A REVOLUTION IN MOBILITY

The world is fast moving towards on-demand mobility, away from private ownership of vehicles. Well before 2047, we can envision electric aircraft plying domestic routes primarily, at about half the present-day fares

- By SATYANARAYANAN CHAKRAVARTHY PROFESSOR, IIT MADRAS, AND CO-FOUNDER, THE EPLANE COMPANY AND AGNIKUL COSMOS

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I was at the immigration counter at Heathrow, London, and the officer wanted to know the purpose of my visit. I said I was there to attend a conference on mobility called “MOVE”. I had to clarify to the confused officer—it’s about driverless cars, air taxis, and the like. He’s not alone. People of an older generation are used to looking at cars and planes as belonging to the realm of transportation and would naturally be puzzled to hear the term “mobility”.

Much later, I was at a panel discussion when a co-panellist clarified the distinction between, “transportation” and “mobility”. Transportation is mode-centric, that is, what a bus service in a city would offer its riders. Mobility, on the other hand, is user-centric, regardless of the modes of transportation.

Mobility, then, has to function at different levels. The world is fast moving towards on-demand mobility (ODM), involving shared mobility, away from private ownership of vehicles. It is in this context that we have to envisage what the scenario on mobility would look like by 2047 in India.