NEW DELHI - Pollution
and road congestion are at
crisis proportions in India's cities. Yet
the government encourages car-centric urban
growth, subsidized by public largesse, says
Anumita Roychowdhury of the non-governmental
Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), which is
leading a campaign for cleaner air in Delhi.
An ultracheap new Indian car that was
unveiled at an autoshow this year got a rousing
media reception. No editorial writer challenged
the manufacturer's assertion that the Nano, priced
at around US$2,500, will be the "people's car".
Three-quarters of India's population live
in its villages. In the first two weeks of
January, 35 poor cotton farmers took their lives
in a region close to Mumbai, the country's
business capital, because
they
couldn't return loans less than half the price of
the new car. IPS correspondent Ann Ninan spoke
with Roychowdhury.
IPS:
Delhi is widening roads, expanding the Metro
service, and still adding new cars on the roads
every day. Is that a mobility
crisis? Anumita Roychowdhury:
This is mobility crisis. Increasingly, a larger
share of daily travel trips are being made in
personal vehicles that hog more road space,
pollute more and use more energy per passenger.
Even though Delhi is privileged to have more than
20% of its land area dedicated to roads, yet the
city is gridlocked.
Delhi already has 4.5
million vehicles and is adding nearly 1,000
personal vehicles a day. Cars - small as well as
big, and many of them driven on toxic diesel - are
jostling for limited road space. The market share
of diesel cars is increasing phenomenally -
already over 30% of new car sales, it is expected
to be 50% by 2010. This overwhelming growth can be
devastating in cities desperate for solutions to
smoke, particles and nitrogen oxides (NOx).
According to the World Health Organization and
other international regulatory and scientific
agencies, diesel particulates are carcinogens.
There is no clear blueprint to address the
mobility crisis. Delhi will have to reinvent [its]
mobility framework to control numbers and usage of
cars.
IPS: You have been
campaigning for public transport?
AR: Let us be clear: cars
cannot meet the commuting needs of the urban
majority. Even today public transport meets a
significant share of commuting trips - 60% in
Delhi, 80% in Mumbai, 70% in Calcutta among
others. But cars and two-wheelers that occupy
nearly 90% of the road space meet less than 20% of
the travel demand. CSE's assessment shows that the
total number of passengers carried by all buses -
public and private - each day in Delhi is
approximately 8.7 million, while approximately the
Metro rail transports over half a million
commuters daily.
This is the strength that
we need to build on to move away from car centric
urban growth. We need to re-design public policies
to promote mobility for all à scale up efficient
public transport and implement policies to
restrain car use.
IPS:
New low-cost cars are going to roll out of
factories. AR: This will
enhance the contrasting trends in Indian market.
Low-cost cars are expected to expand the car
ownership at the base of the market pyramid, when
there is also a steady shift towards bigger and
more powerful cars and SUVs in the market. Thus,
both ends of the pyramid are stretched.
Cheap cars, as others, are poised to
explode without stringent emission standards and
adequate safety regulations. Currently, except for
11 cities, the rest of India is 10 years behind
European emission standards. Eleven cities, which
include Delhi and Mumbai, follow Euro 3 standards.
The low-cost cars will roll out much
before Euro IV (Bharat IV) emissions standards are
in place. Moreover, there is no system to check
and guarantee on-road and lifetime emissions
performance of the vehicles in India. Even though
the small cars are expected to be more
fuel-efficient than big cars and SUVs, their sheer
numbers will undercut the fuel savings possible
from public transport.
IPS: Is air pollution
under control? AR: Pollution
levels are threatening to go up again because of
rapidly growing vehicle numbers. Incentives to
private motorization, through cheap cars, will
have adverse impacts on air pollution, unless
stringent emission standards are introduced
urgently. Nearly 57% of cities that are monitored
have critical levels of deadly particulates.
While the levels of tiny particles that go
very deep into our lungs are very high in most of
our cities, nitrogen dioxide levels that also aid
in the formation of yet another very harmful gas
ozone has also begun to rise as in Delhi. Direct
exposure to traffic fumes is amongst the deadliest
of the health threats. This is unacceptable. Delhi
now needs an aggressive leapfrog agenda to meet
the clean air targets.
IPS: We subsidize
vehicles on a gargantuan scale.
AR: Currently, public policy
does not even aim to recover the full cost of
owning and using a car. It in fact overtly
subsidizes the use of a private vehicle with
public largesse. Car owners do not pay adequately
for the disproportionately high usage of road
space or for parking. If parking charges are
adjusted to reflect the costs of providing parking
in cities, the rates could be four to five times
higher than the current parking rates.
The
government actually penalizes buses by taxing them
higher than cars. A 2004 World Bank study shows
that the total tax burden per vehicle km is 2.3
times higher for public transport buses than cars
in Indian cities. In Delhi, a bus pays roughly 43
times more road taxes than cars. But instead of
addressing the policy distortion, the pressure
from the vehicle industry is to reduce the taxes
further to improve its affordability.
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