Click to play videoHello and welcome to Devil’s Advocate. Is the Nano a miracle of modern manufacturing, which makes cheap cars available to millions, or is it in the Indian situation a potential nightmare that could create unacceptable pollution and urban congestion. That’s the key issue I shall discuss today with Director of the Centre for Science and Environment and a lady that many consider the conscience keeper of India, Sunita Narain.
Karan Thapar: Sunita Narain, when Ratan Tata launched the Nano, he made a tongue-in-cheek comment that it wouldn’t give you sleepless nights. Was he right or was he wrong?
Sunita Narain: The unfortunate thing is that too much gives me sleepless night because the fact is that it is not just the Nano but all the cars coming on the roads which should give all of us sleepless nights, not just me.
Karan Thapar: Let me put it like this: do you see the Nano and the potential increase in cars that it could herald as a miracle of manufacturing that brings cheap cars to millions or do you see it as a potential nightmare in the Indian situation because it could lead to uncontrolled pollution and urban congestion, unless it is very carefully managed.
Sunita Narain: Karan, this is always the Indian answer: both, very clearly both. It is phenomenal to have a car like Nano on the roads and I do believe that it is a technological miracle. It has broken all barriers of cost and affordability.
Remarkable, but in the Indian circumstance it is not just the Nano but all the cars which are going to ape the Nano and the number of cars on our roads. The question that we have to ask is: cars cost us the Earth, can we afford it? And that’s the question that I think the Indians are asking enough.
Karan Thapar: Okay, let’s break that up into two parts. Let’s begin by looking at the potential problem that increase in cars could create and later in part two look at the corrective measure necessary. Let’s start with pollution.
The October 8 issue of your magazine ‘Down to Earth’ says, “On a per passenger basis, a car leaves two times more particulate matter that poses a serious health challenge as compared to a two-wheeler, and four times more compared to a bus.” So is your starting position that any sharp increase in cars and vehicles on the road is something you would not like to see?
Sunita Narain: It’s important for us to understand that cars in India have to be seen differently than say cars in New York, Shanghai or in London because there’s a large number of cars there.
The question in India is that we are getting cars because we are getting richer but we are too poor to afford the regulation that we need for cars that they [other countries] can afford.
Whether it is cleaner fuel, cleaner technology, checking the backside of every car so that your pollution is under control, making sure that you pay for parking, essentially making sure that you are rich enough not just to use the car but also to manage the fallouts of using that car. That’s really the big issue for countries like India and the challenge for us is to think that is car the only way for us to have mobility.
Karan Thapar: Given that concern, what would be the outcome if many of the people today in India who use two-wheelers were to upgrade themselves and buy a Nano instead. What impact would it have on pollution?
Sunita Narain: Essentially two things: one, we must understand that when we talk about the two-wheeler, the fact that is that a two-wheeler takes much lesser space on the road. So with the increase of cars, you essentially get more congestion.
If you get more congestion, your pollution can go up five times. You live in Delhi and I live in Delhi. I would like to ask all your viewers all across the country to just go out and smell the air. And if you cannot smell the toxins in the air and if you don’t understand that this is not just dirty air, that this is going to do the worst things possible to your body. That to me is really a big issue with the cars.
Karan Thapar: Let me point out to you that the Pollution Control Board claims that more than fifty per cent of the ninety cities that it monitors have particulate matters that are already critical. If now you have an exponential increase in the number of cars on the roads and pollutions goes up as a result, as you say, by five times, what would be the impact on those cities?
Sunita Narain: Horrendous. I cannot even begin to describe it in any scientific or technical words. Just understand that it is horrendous. Cities are practically becoming unliveable today.
We just don’t feel it because we somehow put aside the cost to hell. If our children have asthma, we think that it is just the cost of progress. If our old can’t breathe, we simply say, Oh hawa kharab hai. Ab kya kare… (Oh, the air is bad. What can be done…), but we have a choice. We must demand a choice.
Karan Thapar: Now the problem is that no one can actually stop cars from increasing. As people become wealthier, they want to buy cars. It is aspirational. So how do you respond to the research done by the ‘Economic Times’ that says in terms of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions, the Nano is forty per cent better than the other cars? In other words, if cars are going to increase anyway, it is better if people buy the Nano than any other car.
Sunita Narain: It is a slight sleigh of hand, the figures—if I can just explain this. The fact of the matter is that they have compared car to car and not car to two-wheeler. The two-wheelers in India are most fuel efficient. A person gets 60 kilometre per litre from a two-wheeler, but a car will give you a maximum of 22 (kilometre per litre). So I think that is not really the debate in India.
Karan Thapar: In other words this research misses the point?
Sunita Narain: I think this research misses the point. It is still looking, comparing apples to apples and I really want us to begin comparing apples to oranges and perhaps we will make something quite different out of it.
Karan Thapar: Perhaps the most interesting comparison of apples to oranges is the fear that people have of the diesel Nano. They say given that diesel emissions are far more toxic than petrol ones, do you believe there is a case for banning the diesel Nano?
Sunita Narain: I think there is a case for banning all diesel cars, be very clear about this. This makes me really mad…
Karan Thapar: But the diesel Nano in particular because of its price?
Sunita Narain: Well diesel Nano and diesel cars. Be very clear that even a Mercedes Benz owner who buys a Mercedes Benz, which costs Rs 22 lakh and above, but decides to run it on a fuel that is kept cheap because of the poor—this is criminal in this country; this is a loophole. This is exactly my point: government in India has become a mere puppet in the hands of the industry.
Karan Thapar: What about points made by people like Murad Ali Baig, the car expert, who say that your concern about diesel engines is misplaced because you are not taking into account the enormous strides and advances the modern diesel engine has made. He points out that today 49 percent of all passenger cars in Europe as a whole and 69 percent in France specifically are diesel.
Sunita Narain: Yes, absolutely. But Mr Baig is essentially playing with words because when he calls on advanced technology, it requires fuel of 50 ppm and below of sulphur. We have 350 ppm of sulphur in our fuel, so let us be clear we are far away from what he calls clean fuel and clean technology. What you get is toxic emissions. Please understand this, diesel emissions are carcinogenic. This is not just simply about some dirty air: this about your and mine health.
Karan Thapar: And you are in fact saying the modern diesel engine would be undermined in India because of the dirty diesel available?
Sunita Narain: You cannot use a modern diesel engine, because you have dirty diesel in India. And Mr Baig knows that.
Karan Thapar: What about the impact of explosion in cars on our roads on traffic congestion? Surveys show between 19977 and 2002 the average speed of a vehicle on the roads of Delhi has fallen from 27 kilometre per hour to 15 kilometre per hour. I gather now it has fallen down to 10 kilometre per hour
Sunita Narain: Absolutely.
Karan Thapar: So in the next five years if you see a million or more Nanos on the roads, not to mention the increase in all the other cars, could we have virtual gridlock?
Sunita Narain: Just look at Delhi—often I am accused of using Delhi as an instance—but Delhi is the richest city of India and we all want all cities to become as rich as Delhi. Delhi actually buys more cars than it buys two-wheelers but if you look 20 percent of this city—and please believe me on this figure—is under roads.
Karan Thapar: Which is enormous.
Sunita Narain: Which is enormous! Just imagine any city where 20 percent of land area (is under roads)—10 percent of this city is under trees.
Karan Thapar: And yet traffic still doesn’t move.
Sunita Narain: And we have increased our road length by 20 percent but the amount of cars on the road has gone up by 138 percent. That I think is the big challenge for India.
Karan Thapar: Your magazine ‘Down To Earth’ says that in fact increasing roads is not an answer to the increase of cars because as the road capacity expands traffic expands almost equivalently? Is that really proven?
Sunita Narain: It is absolutely—many people have been to London and if you think about the Orbital in London; you know what it is called in London. It is called the country’s biggest parking lot because no car moves there and that is four-lane orbital-ring road they made around London.
Karan Thapar: And that is happening to normal roads in Delhi?
Sunita Narain: And that is happening to normal roads in Delhi. I will give you another instance of our inability to understand the scale we need to deal with. When we built the highway between Delhi and Gurgaon—which is a four lane, new, modern highway—this is coming with a capacity of 1,60,000 vehicles in 2016. Do you know the number of cars today on that highway? 1,30,000.
Karan Thapar: Which means well before 2016 we would have exceeded the built-in capacity?
Sunita Narain: We are already exceeding it almost, so why do you expect that you will be ever be able to keep up with the demand for infrastructure. This is also about mind frame: ‘oh, we will build more roads, we will build more highways; we will build flyovers and now we will build flyovers over flyovers’. (We) are not realising that they will all get filled up and you will actually have less ability to move as more cars come in.
Karan Thapar: Let us now talk about the corrective measures necessary to prevent an urban nightmare as a result of the explosion in cars. To begin with do you think the time has come to stop the subsidisation of diesel, the most polluting fuel of all?
Sunita Narain: Absolutely, because what you are allowing is cheap and dirty motorization. The government is losing on every litre of diesel that we use in our private cars.
Karan Thapar: If politicians won’t bite the bullet and stop subsidisation of diesel would it be a suitable alternative to sizeably increase the excise tax on diesel cars?
Sunita Narain: I think that is exactly what we are saying. We understand there is a loophole. We understand politicians are helpless because diesel is kept cheap for agriculture and we know cars are making use of that loophole, so we are simply telling the government increase the excise duty. But I will bet you, Karan, that it is something the government doesn’t have the guts to do because industry will never let it.
Karan Thapar: We have a budget coming up in February, so let us wait and see. Would you say a second important step is to charge realistic fees for parking? For instance, in Washington parking for a day costs $15, it is $30 in New York and Rs 10 in Delhi.
Sunita Narain: It is always amazing for me that we are allowing cars to come in without any regulations. Just think we go hunting for office space, we need a desk and we know how expensive it is to get that desk space. And yet the car uses 23 sq m of space—23 sq m of space!
Just to give you a comparison a jhuggi, a slum-dweller’s house takes 15 sq m of space. So tell me why is it that we are not charging for that parking at the rates of real estate?
Karan Thapar: Your organisation, CSE, suggested a few years ago that parking fees in Delhi should be increased to at least Rs 120 a day. Is that you something you stand by?
Sunita Narain: We basically calculated the cost of providing that parking and if you look at the multi-level parking lots that are coming up as an alternative you essentially find to recover the cost you really need to pay Rs 30 an hour. So we tried to give a sort of slight subsidy to urban dwellers and suggested Rs 120 a day. But we know how difficult it is to get something like that?
Karan Thapar: Do you think Delhi and perhaps Bombay need to go one step further? Do they need to emulate London and Singapore and charge congestion charges from motorists who insist on driving into the most congested part of the town?
Sunita Narain: Well I think if you were to increase your parking rates you would essentially have a high-congestion tax. But if I can take us to another issue, which is equally important and that is really what I call mental barrier to change. These are all regulatory issues but you can have regulation if you believe you can do things differently.
When we brought in CNG into Delhi every body accused us, saying you cannot have CNG because nowhere in the world it has happened. We said this a leapfrog technology, and now the leapfrog I am presenting is you have cities in India where essentially large numbers of people drive by bus, not by car.
Please understand this 60 percent of this richest city (Delhi) actually drives by bus. The car moves less than 10 percent of the people (but) it occupies 70 percent of the road space. Now the question is can you reinvent that by essentially saying I will not go through the car route and jump to the most affordable, most convenient public transport.
Karan Thapar: Absolutely. What you are therefore suggesting is a two-fold strategy: on the one hand you are saying discourage the use of cars and thus take them off the roads without banning them and instead encourage people by giving them incentives to use public transport.
The problem is that you can only do the two together; you cannot do them one after another. At the moment today public transport is neither reliable, nor is it extensive, for some it is not affordable and certainly it is not efficient. How does the government give us the sort of public transport we need so that we would be incentivized to take the bus or the metro rather than want a car?
Sunita Narain: If I can just be very blunt about this: by stop talking about it and by doing something on it. Let us be very clear we are talking about a transition, we are not talking about adding a few buses to Delhi’s roads. We are talking about a transition of a scale that has never been done in the world.
Karan Thapar: You say act, don’t talk but what is the action that is needed beyond the simple answer of throwing more money at the problem? What are the specific steps?
Sunita Narain: Three things. Get your taxes right, today the car pays less tax than the bus and it should be the other way round. The bus is much more fuel efficient, it uses less space, it is much better for the environment and it provides mobility to a large number of people.
Second, you restructure your bus agencies. Your biggest challenge today is that your bus agencies are inefficient. Focus on it, spend money on it, spend time on it.
Third, let the politicians believe this is the big-ticket answer for India. It is not the aam aadmi (common man) who will drive the car, the aam aadmi will be most benefited when you improve public transport.
Karan Thapar: The third perhaps is the most difficult because that is where the mindset change you talked about comes into play. How do you convince the politicians that not just the future of India but rewards for them in their careers lie in tackling the traffic problem of all Indian cities?
Sunita Narain: I think you convince them by the sheer logic of what is happening around you. Let us be very clear, which politician can take pride in building a flyover today. Which politician can say they have done something for the country when large numbers of their city people don’t even have the money to take a bus.
Karan Thapar: Can I say why I am sceptical politicians will actually respond you want to because most politicians don’t suffer from traffic problem. Ministers, the Prime Minister, the President drive through with convoys, the road is stopped for them, the traffic is cleared. You and I stand and suffer, they just sail past. They probably have no idea what traffic congestion means.
Sunita Narain: Undoubtedly, the tragedy of India is the tragedy of New Delhi in some senses. Lutyen’s Delhi is one place in the world which will never have a traffic jam, but I think there is much more to this.
My question is also to industry. Which Indian industrialist, who has stood in front of their fanciest of cars, has ever come out to you and said I will make the cheapest, most affordable, most convenient bus, and I will stand in front of it and tell all of India that is the way for mobility.
Karan Thapar: So you are saying to Ratan Tata, it is not the Nano car India needs—many Indians do need it and it’s a boon—but what India needs is the Nano equivalent of the bus.
Sunita Narain: Absolutely. Well he is also in the bus business, and I think he can be our hero if he was to now put his attention into making that bus which will drive not just a small part of India and will create congestion and pollution but will drive large parts of India and will drive so at least risk to our health.
Karan Thapar: So you are saying to Ratan Tata today I appreciate the Nano car but I would value you much more, I would consider a much bigger hero if you produced the Nano bus which would make public mobility cheaply possible and environmentally friendly for hundreds of millions, not just tens of millions.
Sunita Narain: I will add to it in the most convenient way. I want to make sure that that bus breaks all barriers of class—you do not want a bus which is rickety, dirty and not air-conditioned. You want the best possible bus, you want it to be efficient, you want to make sure that your city can do this in a way (which) no other city (has done) other than Singapore.
Karan Thapar: Ratan Tata might not have caused you sleepless nights, may be what you are saying today is going to cause him a little loss of sleep himself. But let me end this by putting it like this: Ratan Tata has made the people’s car possible for tens of millions of Indians, but those people are not going to be able to use the people’s car without needless suffering and pain unless the government responds and manages the situation? Isn’t that right?
Sunita Narain: Absolutely, but I think also we as Indians start having pride and think we can do things differently. Large parts of India will not drive the car, they will drive the bus.
Karan Thapar: Are you an optimist that the government will buy this bullet or are you an pessimist?
Sunita Narain: Oh, I am an absolutely an optimist. I believe if the crisis is too big we will have to find the answers. There is no doubt in my mind.
Karan Thapar: Sunita Narain, a pleasure talking to you.
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