TURNING CAR POOLS INTO CAB TRAINS

WHILE petrol prices shoot up and a heatwave builds up, there’s a one-liner on social media that throws a third dimension to commuting in the National Capital Region—half of Delhi works in Gurugram and half of Gurugram works in Delhi, and they are all stuck on NH48.

- MADHAVAN NARAYANAN

The highway that connects the capital with its affluent satellite is perpetually jammed. But a casual look will show that most of the cars are driven by middle-aged men flaunting their new affluence with no other passenger in sight. The stories in Mumbai, Chennai or Bengaluru are not much different. Choked roads do not go well with aspirational lifestyles, but there’s little people do about it.

It appears all the more ironic given the ongoing oil shock. It is good to see ministers combining photoshoot moments aboard metro carriages with appeals to increase car-pooling so that we can save valuable dollars in oil imports. But this needs a reality check.

A hard look at car-pooling in India shows we have barely scratched the surface. More importantly, faced with issues that make the commonsensical idea of sharing car rides to save on fuel costs and, hopefully, commuting time is not as loaded with common sense as it would seem at first.

We need to reverse-swing our thoughts to humbler modes of transport like auto-rickshaws and the increasingly popular e-rickshaws to get a hang of what we can do about it. But before that, a few thoughts on India’s automobile culture may be in order.

It is my firm belief that three things drive India’s car boom: cheap loans, the image of a car as a status symbol and its position as a middle-class dream that dates back to the days when incomes were low and roads were barren. A lot has changed since, but a cultural hangover remains.