By mid-morning, the air is heavy with choking fumes from vehicles gridlocked in New Delhi's prime business district. But if Tata Motors, India's largest car manufacturer, sells all 250,000 of the ultracheap cars it is planning to make this year, the congestion and pollution will get far worse.
The 100,000 rupee (US$2,500) Nano car, unveiled last week, will be the cheapest new car on the market by far in India, and perhaps the world. Some people say the stripped-down, spartan box is an extraordinary engineering feat that will revolutionize transport in India; others claim it will inevitably lead to thousands of deaths and to unimaginable congestion. It has already led to massive protests about thousands of people having to give up their homes in the West Bengal town of Singur, about 30km north of Calcutta, as fertile agricultural land has been forcibly acquired to build the factory where the cars will be made.
Ratan Tata, chairman of the Tata Group, admits that the new car may not meet western emission regulations, but says that the car will be the least polluting available on the Indian market. However, that's not saying much, as Indian air quality standards are way below anything in Europe.
The level of air pollution in Indian cities is now at dangerous levels. The average concentration of particulate matter in the air in residential areas of Mumbai just before Christmas was measured at 521 micrograms per cubic meter, and that of Calcutta at 435 -- both way over permissible limits. In some of Delhi's residential areas, a level of 3,940 micrograms was recorded.
More than half the Indian cities monitored for air pollution already show critical levels. A recent study by the Centre for Science and Environment, a New Delhi-based think tank on environmental safety, described the situation as alarming. The situation is made worse by the poor quality of diesel fuel available in India: most has a sulphur content of 500 parts per million, compared with a European standard of 10ppm.
Nor is there any certainty that the new cars will improve mobility as average road speeds in Indian cities keep falling. Delhi has an average speed of 17km per hour, while Mumbai's traffic moves at 13km/h. In Chennai and Calcutta, two of the pollution hotspots, the average speeds are 13km/h and 7km/h respectively.
The number of cars in India is expected to triple to 8 million by 2015, spewing out 319 million tonnes of carbon dioxide -- nearly double what is emitted now. So as the rest of the world tries to clean up its act, India seems to be motoring in the opposite direction.
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