The iCar - "I" for India That Is

Jamsetji Tata was 43 when, in 1882, he applied to the government in Great Britain for a licence to prospect in his own country, India. Tata had come across a report which claimed that Ritter von Schwartz had discovered a “hill of iron” in Lohara. To Tata this was an enormous opportunity; to the imperial government, it was sacrilege. India was, after all, to use the writer Douglas Collier’s words, “a source of raw material, a market for manufactured goods” — and it was desirable to keep it that way. How dare an Indian have desired that Indian steel compete against the English? But they had missed the point. To Tata, this was not just business: it was a positive act of nationalism. He wanted to empower Indians by breaking British monopoly. As RM Lala has noted, Jamsetji “was a nationalist long before this word had any real significance” in India.

A century and two decades later, Jamsetji's great-grandson, Ratan Tata, declared something equally sweeping. He promised to produce a "people's car" priced at just 100,000 rupees—that is just over $2,000. He was troubled, he said, by the sight of an entire family riding on a two-wheeler — father at the handle, child standing in the front, mother on the back seat with a baby clutched to her chest — a ubiquitous sight on Indian roads. There are even more troubling sights on India's streets, and by their standards the bike-riding families which Tata invoked to build his cars are an enviable entity. But Ratan Tata, like his grandfather, is a man of deed: useful action takes precedence over divagatory thought.

So, in the face of bitter criticism and amidst stentorian calls of imminent doom, Ratan Tata got to work on his ambitious project. But the question remained: what sort of a car could possibly be produced for a price cheaper than the cost of a high-end bicycle? A strong team of 500, led by Girish Wagh, the wunderkind of Indian engineering, started dabbling with a variety of ideas. “All we had,” Wagh later said, “was a cost target — that and the fact that it had to be a real car.” But they were all fired up by Tata's vision. Wagh acknowledged to an interviewer that his team “knew they were doing it for” Ratan Tata. After five years of hard work, they were ready with the World's Cheapest Car. Designed, produced and assembled in India, the Nano had exceeded all expectations. Sleek and comfortable, with an innovative rear-mounted engine, it met local environmental regulations and did not, in spite of growing costs, exceed the promised price of 100,000 rupees. “A promise is a promise,” Tata declared as he unveiled the Nano to cheering crowds last year.

It is tempting to attribute Tata's success partly to the bruiting about of his critics — adversity, after all, has always served to strengthen the will of the great men it set out to destroy — but to do so would elevate his mawkish critics to a height which they do not deserve, and demean the unwavering vision of a great paladin. Yet it is striking that none of his critics once stopped to appreciate the marvel that Tata had bestowed upon India; none paused to ponder the sheer audacity of human enterprise, right here at home, that embodies the potential to positively empower not just many Indians and other Asians but people everywhere.

Some claimed that the Nano would exacerbate the already awful conditions of congestion under which most commuters in urban India operate. This is the attitude of those who want to punish the nation for the failures of the state. If the problem is congestion, the solution lies in expanding the roads and improving public transport, not in muzzling private enterprise. Other critics, particularly the eco-ayatollahs in the West, repeated the predictable climate-change mantra. It was particularly galling to see newspapers whose principal readership belongs in countries which in the past were at the forefront of polluting the planet in the spirit of carpe diem and which remain among the worst polluters in the world today asking if the world could afford the Nano.

Western voluptuaries who are now advocating austerity to non-Westerners must realise that development cannot come without pollution. To be more blunt, though climate-change is a real threat, those who have overwhelmingly contributed to its causes must also be the ones who devise and pay for solutions to curb it. This may appear harsh to Western readers, but the notion that people in Asia and Africa should renounce or deny themselves the comforts which Al Gore takes for granted is not just ridiculous; it is cruel.

Ratan Tata, whose legendary Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay became the principal site of terrorist slaughter last November, recently disappointed his admirers by offering praise to the Hindu chauvinist leader Narendra Modi (the Tatas are Parsis). But no one can doubt the Tatas’ contributions to India’s growth. Profit is, as it should be, a strong motive in private enterprise of any kind, but the Tatas give a staggering 66 percent of the profits from their parent company, Tata Sons, to charity.

The Nano, which was launched last week, provides millions of people across Asia, Africa, and parts of Latin America — and even Europe and the United States — the opportunity to possess an affordable and relatively safe and comfortable means of transportation; but equally importantly, it provides the privilege of ownership. This moment in history deserves genuine approbation, not condescension.