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India cannot be car country like the US. When you have four times the population living in a third of the land area, you cannot be.
While people will always aspire to own cars or motorbikes, state policy must encourage public transport, buses and taxis, not cars and motorbikes.
India is motorising personal transport at a rate it simply cannot afford. In 2016-17, it produced nearly 20 million passenger vehicles – including cars and two-wheelers, but not three-wheelers – taking the country’s total registered non-commercial vehicle population to around 220 million.
The vehicles on the road (especially if you add three-wheelers and commercial vehicles) are now comparable to the total number of households in India (around 250 million). It implies, in theory, that every household has a vehicle, though averages will deceive because a few people and organisations may own multiple vehicles while millions of poor households may have nothing. But the implication is clear: since Indians rarely scrap vehicles before they are 10-15 years old, we are reaching saturation point in terms of our infrastructure’s ability to handle such volumes.
If our rapidly urbanising country is not to fall apart under traffic congestion and vehicular pollution, we have to reverse this trend, particularly in cars.
India’s car sales crossed the three million mark in 2016-17 despite the demand crunch of demonetisation. While this is a cause for celebration for the domestic automobile industry, it signals the total bankruptcy of public policy in human transportation.
India cannot be car country like the US. When you have four times the population living in a third of the land area, you cannot be. While people will always aspire to own cars or motorbikes, both for status and convenience, state policy must encourage public transport, buses and taxis, not cars and motorbikes.
Of late, there has been a tendency to tout metro railway projects as the answer to urban commuting woes, but here too the reality is different. The huge success of the first phase of the Delhi Metro, which was completed well before time and with minimal cost over-runs, has made some urbanised states believe that metros are the answer. They forget that Delhi is unique, where the central government deals with land and substantially bankrolls a high-cost metro. This situation does not exist in other states, whose metropolitan centres need to obtain substantial commercial funds for both land acquisition and construction in congested spaces. Delhi has lots of road spaces under which metros can be built; but can Mumbai or Kolkata do so with their more limited road spaces?
Experience from metro projects the world over suggests that not only do costs inflate hugely, but the required traffic to sustain a viable metro is far lower than estimated. Tariffs are never high enough to make metros viable in most cases.
Given this context, one cannot see metros as the panacea for urban mass transportation. They can, at best, be a part of the solution in some cities with enough land available. The focus needs to be on augmenting the fleet of public and private bus services, which are not only cheaper to acquire, but can also use urban roads more economically. Metros surely need to be built, but they may often not be viable. They should be built only in places where traffic may be extraordinarily dense and the cost of land is reasonable – not an easy combination to find. Put simply, metros may work better in connecting city centres with satellite towns than inside existing urban megalopolises. Buses must take up the job where metros terminate.
A sensible public transport policy must have two crucial legs: one is to disincentivise private ownership and daily use of cars and two-wheelers; and the other is to promote bus travel, by making many types of buses (basic, luxury, standees-only) available at frequent intervals, if needed with state subsidies. These subsidies can be financed by taxing cars much more heavily than they are now, and by introducing road usage fees and congestion surcharges, not to speak of higher yearly registration fees. The current system of one-time registration fees is too little, and offers no deterrence to widespread ownership and use of cars on urban roads.
Put another way, no public transport policy can work without disincentivising personal transport vehicles. Those who need cars should be encouraged to use app-based taxi services like Uber and Ola, not to speak of regular state-licensed radio and non-radio taxis. Taxis, by plying several trips during the day, reduce the overall volume of cars on roads.
Disincentivising ownership also means levying high parking fees and user charges for private cars plying on busy roads. If London has a congestion surcharge, why not Mumbai, Kolkata or Bengaluru? The remedy is not to build more roads and more parking lots – though these are also needed – but to favour public transport in the use of this infrastructure. The purpose of levying high charges on cars and two-wheelers is not necessarily to earn more revenues for the exchequer, but to cross-subsidise buses and, where reasonably viable, even metro projects.
Any policy must also start taxing two-wheelers. The current tendency is to treat two-wheelers as some kind of poor man’s vehicle, but given the huge growth in two-wheelers on city roads, two or three of them occupy as much road space as cars, especially when they are moving fast. Moreover, given the speeds at which they are driven, they are accident-prone, and impose costs on society that we do not even begin to calculate. Any increase in motorised transport taxes, including highway tolls, should not exclude two-wheelers.
A country of 1.3 billion people, and with rapidly congesting urban spaces, cannot privilege private vehicle usage.
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- In the Small States category (overall), Nagaland tops, followed by Mizoram and Tripura. Towards the tail end of the overall Delta ranking is Uttarakhand (9th), Arunachal Pradesh (10th) and Meghalaya (11th). Nagaland despite being a poor performer in the PAI 2021 Index has come out to be the top performer in Delta, similarly, Mizoram’s performance in Delta is also reflected in it’s ranking in the PAI 2021 Index
- In terms of Equity, in the Large States category, Chhattisgarh has the best Delta rate on Equity indicators, this is also reflected in the performance of Chhattisgarh in the Equity Pillar where it ranks 4th. Following Chhattisgarh is Odisha ranking 2nd in Delta-Equity ranking, but ranks 17th in the Equity Pillar of PAI 2021. Telangana ranks 3rd in Delta-Equity ranking even though it is not a top performer in this Pillar in the overall PAI 2021 Index. Jharkhand (16th), Uttar Pradesh (17th) and Assam (18th) rank at the bottom with Uttar Pradesh’s performance in line with the PAI 2021 Index
- Odisha and Nagaland have shown the best year-on-year improvement under 12 Key Development indicators.
- In the 60:40 division States, the top three performers are Kerala, Goa and Tamil Nadu and, the bottom three performers are Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand and Bihar.
- In the 90:10 division States, the top three performers were Himachal Pradesh, Sikkim and Mizoram; and, the bottom three performers are Manipur, Assam and Meghalaya.
- Among the 60:40 division States, Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh are the top three performers and Tamil Nadu, Telangana and Delhi appear as the bottom three performers.
- Among the 90:10 division States, the top three performers are Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland; and, the bottom three performers are Jammu and Kashmir, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh
- Among the 60:40 division States, Goa, West Bengal and Delhi appear as the top three performers and Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Bihar appear as the bottom three performers.
- Among the 90:10 division States, Mizoram, Himachal Pradesh and Tripura were the top three performers and Jammu & Kashmir, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh were the bottom three performers
- West Bengal, Bihar and Tamil Nadu were the top three States amongst the 60:40 division States; while Haryana, Punjab and Rajasthan appeared as the bottom three performers
- In the case of 90:10 division States, Mizoram, Assam and Tripura were the top three performers and Nagaland, Jammu & Kashmir and Uttarakhand featured as the bottom three
- Among the 60:40 division States, the top three performers are Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa and the bottom three performers are Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand and Goa
- In the 90:10 division States, the top three performers are Mizoram, Sikkim and Nagaland and the bottom three performers are Manipur and Assam
In a diverse country like India, where each State is socially, culturally, economically, and politically distinct, measuring Governance becomes increasingly tricky. The Public Affairs Index (PAI 2021) is a scientifically rigorous, data-based framework that measures the quality of governance at the Sub-national level and ranks the States and Union Territories (UTs) of India on a Composite Index (CI).
States are classified into two categories – Large and Small – using population as the criteria.
In PAI 2021, PAC defined three significant pillars that embody Governance – Growth, Equity, and Sustainability. Each of the three Pillars is circumscribed by five governance praxis Themes.
The themes include – Voice and Accountability, Government Effectiveness, Rule of Law, Regulatory Quality and Control of Corruption.
At the bottom of the pyramid, 43 component indicators are mapped to 14 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that are relevant to the States and UTs.
This forms the foundation of the conceptual framework of PAI 2021. The choice of the 43 indicators that go into the calculation of the CI were dictated by the objective of uncovering the complexity and multidimensional character of development governance
The Equity Principle
The Equity Pillar of the PAI 2021 Index analyses the inclusiveness impact at the Sub-national level in the country; inclusiveness in terms of the welfare of a society that depends primarily on establishing that all people feel that they have a say in the governance and are not excluded from the mainstream policy framework.
This requires all individuals and communities, but particularly the most vulnerable, to have an opportunity to improve or maintain their wellbeing. This chapter of PAI 2021 reflects the performance of States and UTs during the pandemic and questions the governance infrastructure in the country, analysing the effectiveness of schemes and the general livelihood of the people in terms of Equity.
Growth and its Discontents
Growth in its multidimensional form encompasses the essence of access to and the availability and optimal utilisation of resources. By resources, PAI 2021 refer to human resources, infrastructure and the budgetary allocations. Capacity building of an economy cannot take place if all the key players of growth do not drive development. The multiplier effects of better health care, improved educational outcomes, increased capital accumulation and lower unemployment levels contribute magnificently in the growth and development of the States.
The Pursuit Of Sustainability
The Sustainability Pillar analyses the access to and usage of resources that has an impact on environment, economy and humankind. The Pillar subsumes two themes and uses seven indicators to measure the effectiveness of government efforts with regards to Sustainability.
The Curious Case Of The Delta
The Delta Analysis presents the results on the State performance on year-on-year improvement. The rankings are measured as the Delta value over the last five to 10 years of data available for 12 Key Development Indicators (KDI). In PAI 2021, 12 indicators across the three Pillars of Equity (five indicators), Growth (five indicators) and Sustainability (two indicators). These KDIs are the outcome indicators crucial to assess Human Development. The Performance in the Delta Analysis is then compared to the Overall PAI 2021 Index.
Key Findings:-
In the Scheme of Things
The Scheme Analysis adds an additional dimension to ranking of the States on their governance. It attempts to complement the Governance Model by trying to understand the developmental activities undertaken by State Governments in the form of schemes. It also tries to understand whether better performance of States in schemes reflect in better governance.
The Centrally Sponsored schemes that were analysed are National Health Mission (NHM), Umbrella Integrated Child Development Services scheme (ICDS), Mahatma Gandh National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan (SmSA) and MidDay Meal Scheme (MDMS).
National Health Mission (NHM)
INTEGRATED CHILD DEVELOPMENT SERVICES (ICDS)
MID- DAY MEAL SCHEME (MDMS)
SAMAGRA SHIKSHA ABHIYAN (SMSA)
MAHATMA GANDHI NATIONAL RURAL EMPLOYMENT GUARANTEE SCHEME (MGNREGS)