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August 2008 Edition

Umesh Anand

The Reva, India’s only commercially produced electric car, deserves much more attention in this country than it gets. It is for the second time that it is making an attempt to enter the Delhi market --- with the difference that it now has serious tax concessions from the state government. The Reva is the product of a new brand of entrepreneurship. Chetan Maini has for the past decade has been a man ahead of his times. He has built a car that is not only a technological marvel, but also a social statement of our times.

People become fans of the Reva because it is such an amazing car to drive. It is so easy to handle and costs just 40 paise a kilometre to run. It has no emissions, no great maintenance costs and apart from being safe in crashes of any kind its body is made of material that takes a knock and springs back to normal. There are 1,000 Revas running in London for these very reasons.

What then is holding back the Reva in India? It is the absence of government support for electric car technology. This is why the Delhi state government’s decision to give the Reva tax concessions up to 30 per cent matters so much. If it were to follow this up with infrastructure like recharging points and waivers of parking fees, chances are that the Reva will be able to reach numbers that will not only make it viable but also change the way we live.

China has gone from just 40,000 electric vehicles to 18 million in preparation for the Olympics. Europe has lots and lots of cars, but public transport, cycles and so on matter more there. Latin America has innumerable examples of bus systems that have taken polluting cars off the road. If the world can make the shift to cleaner ways of living, why can’t we?

Delhi’s example of funding concessions on electric vehicles with a 25 paise cess on every litre of petrol sold in the city can become the model for other cities which are similarly plagued by runaway air pollution and traffic congestion. Reva apart, we have in this issue stories from across the country. There are the resilient red bees of South India, which, because of their ability to ward off viruses, have revived the interest of agriculturists in bee-keeping. From Kabul comes an exclusive report on the genuineness of the Indian presence in Afghanistan. We also found that in Darjeeling the new agitation for a Gorkhaland has a young force at its core. It is  development and growth on a scale the staid and ageing Left Front government in West Bengal is not able to provide.

We managed to catch up with the microfinance bunch for the release of the Sa-Dhan report on the sector. And finally, there is an eye-opener of a conversation with the redoubtable Rahul Bajaj, who was kind enough to spare time for me to talk about corporate accountability.

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