STUDY * India - Cars or scars?

Only fiscal measures can end the nightmare of private vehicles bringing all movement on the roads to a standstill

New Delhi,India -The Business Standard, by Sreelatha Menon (Mumbai,Maharashtra,India) -January 24, 2008: -- ... For every man, a car. It is a thought worth celebrating but is there a guarantee of a smooth ride on the road for every car owner, not to speak of others?... Spending two or three hours on congested roads and inching one’s way ahead is definitely not what driving should be about. The number of hours is bound to increase as cars increase in number. And with that will increase the costs of congestion... Does this country looking forward to a billion Nano-citizens have a strategy to make its cars less of scars that do nothing but choke the roads and beat the very purpose of being on four wheels?... Recently the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) proposed to Finance Minister P Chidambaram a recipe for liberating the roads and the citizens from the terror of being spaced out. Its first remedy was, of course, to scrap the excise duty on buses to make public transport cheap, (even free to some extent, for students and senior citizens), while scaling up the bar for those aspiring to own and use a private vehicle... Both cars and buses now pay the same excise duty which CSE says is unfair. The present tax regime does not justify the social and environmental costs of motorisation — the bus and car should not be paying the same taxes, says CSE director Sunita Narain...Any incentive for public transport can yield gains both in revenue as well as faster road transport, something which even a car user would look forward to any day. (Video from YouTube, by jimaluko, May 04, 2007 -"New Delhi Traffic" My friends and I were visiting New Delhi, India prior to our friend's wedding in the city of Kanpur, a small industrial town of 2 million. We decided we had to visit the Taj Mahal first, in the city of Agra. We debated an overnight train, but settled on hiring a taxi for the 6 hour drive. What we didn't bank on was the heavy traffic we encountered as we left Delhi)