Monday, April 01, 2013

Stop Missing The Woods Already!

The Indian Automotive Market has seen a very Internecine Battle for Small Cars, but Unfortunately, Precious little has been done to Encourage Green Technologies in Cars. B&E wonders when The Hybrid Revolution will actually take off.

“Save the environment. We owe it to our future generations.” Even amidst all the greenwashing that the world gets exposed to nowadays, a statement like this would never fail to grab your attention. But the first world often alleges that in developing economies like India and China, environment often gets substituted by economy. And if they trace the first world path to economic growth, the earth is really headed to its doom.

A recent study by Yale suggested that India’s CO2 emissions grew by almost 8.7% to reach 1.6 billion tons, thereby making India the world’s third largest emitter of CO2 after China and US. While economic development can hardly be compromised, can’t India develop more responsibly than the West did and manage the two seemingly contrarian objectives. While leapfrogging is a buzzword for us in so many different ways, shouldn’t it also figure in our entire approach towards the environment?

The Indian automotive industry is a case in (counter) point, which produced 1.62 million vehicles in April 2011; a growth of around 23% yoy. The small car battle has led to massive competition but unfortunately, in a country where economy (again!) makes more sense than environment, the evolution of green cars hasn’t really taken off. The diversification, albeit visible, is much more towards CNG and LPG powered vehicles. Renewable sources are still being dreamt of as future technologies. More current is a blame game from all corners and a deplorable lack of accountability.

That is why the ‘Bijlees’ are few and far between. We’re neither talking about India’s entertainment baron, nor are we referring to ‘electricity’ per se. Actually, ‘Bijlee’ was an electrically powered three wheeler developed by Mahindra Mahindra (M&M) in strategic collaboration with Jayem Automobiles in 2003. Despite India’s unique position from where it can consolidate itself as a leading promoter of green technology in an era of global power shifts, all that the project could convincingly generate was a subsidy of Rs.8 lakh on electric component excise duty. Unfortunately, the taxes remain intact with high cost of lithum ion batteries and imported technology, which kept it away from the consumer. The green story saw another initiative when Chetan Kumar Maini, the man behind Reva, India’s only electric car to date, came into the limelight in 2007. But electric cars haven’t been fortunate enough to be mass sellers in India.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist). For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles
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