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.
The conflict in the Middle East has been disrupting financial markets, raising concerns about rising inflationary pressures and global economic growth. One market that some investors are particularly worried about has not been heavily covered in the news: the private credit market. Even before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global capital markets had faced growing structural pressure — the deteriorating funding conditions in the private credit market. The private credit market is where companies borrow funds directly from nonbank financial institutions such as asset management companies, insurance companies and private lending platforms. Its popularity has risen since
On March 22, 2023, at the close of their meeting in Moscow, media microphones were allowed to record Chinese Communist Party (CCP) dictator Xi Jinping (習近平) telling Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin, “Right now there are changes — the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years — and we are the ones driving these changes together.” Widely read as Xi’s oath to create a China-Russia-dominated world order, it can be considered a high point for the China-Russia-Iran-North Korea (CRINK) informal alliance, which also included the dictatorships of Venezuela and Cuba. China enables and assists Russia’s war against Ukraine and North Korea’s
An article published in the Dec. 12, 1949, edition of the Central Daily News (中央日報) bore a headline with the intimidating phrase: “You Cannot Escape.” The article was about the execution of seven “communist spies,” some say on the basis of forced confessions, at the end of the 713 Penghu Incident. Those were different times, born of political paranoia shortly after the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) relocated to Taiwan following defeat in China by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The phrase was a warning by the KMT regime to the local populace not to challenge its power or threaten national unity. The
Since taking office, President William Lai (賴清德) has been an active proponent of the Healthy Taiwan initiative. As a member of the Healthy Taiwan Promotion Committee, I have also contributed recommendations on various pharmaceutical policies. After the committee concluded its seventh meeting on Saturday last week, Lai announced that the government is considering a three-year suspension on the Drug Expenditure Target (DET) system’s routine drug price surveys, highlighting the need to further support drug supply resilience. While I am supportive of this policy direction, I must also stress the importance of maintaining our original objective of improving the quality of
RSS