Oh (na)NO!

Last month not just India but the world was swooning over Tata's Nano, and
how it will change the fortunes for the automobile industry-and the common man,
whose corporation everybody wants to take care of these days. Global media
seemed to have gone into the celebration mode. And engineers are giving all the
credit to infotech.

Unfortunately, I am worried. IT is helping automobile makers to come up with
some of the best-designed cars that can be sold in India and other emerging
economies. But IT is not helping us at all in terms of creating a civil
infrastructure that will ensure that these cars can run on the roads.

Coming from perhaps India's only millenium city, Gurgaon, I am still
recovering from a near disaster, called a 16-lane toll plaza on the Gurgaon-Delhi
border. I need not elaborate on the two-mile-long queues and 45 minute waiting
time commuters had to undergo when this much touted modern solution for faster
transportation was launched. When I spoke to a few people, they just blamed
everything on incorrect projection.

The planners had estimated that there would be a movement of 120,000 vehicles
on this road by 2010. We have exceeded that number today. I don't know which
software was used, and what data was fed to get such horribly wrong projections
in this era of information technology.

Ibrahim Ahmad

Some temporary solution has been worked out, but the way automobile numbers
are going up in the country, I am not too sure how this 16-lane plaza will cope
with millions of people traveling to and from Gurgaon.

Similar is the story of thousands of professionals who live in Gurgaon.
Electricity supply has collapsed, roads and drainage are in the pits. Most roads
have been converted into parking lots. Just imagine when there are thousand of
little cars, which also want their place on the roads, in the parking lots, on
the toll plaza.

I also read a recent report about four big hubs being planned for Gurgaon,
which will house four lakh IT professionals. They are not worried about how they
will make it to Gurgaon, and how people in Guragon will move around.

Therefore, I am not too sure if this common man's little Nano, or for that
matter the increasiong number of automobiles, will serve the common man or turn
into a monster ready to gobble up lots of other things including health and
peace of mind.