The night-walkers of Uganda

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India gears up for mass motoring 
revolution with £1,260 car
Environmentalists fear city smog nightmare if millions 
of Tata’s Nanos hit the road.
Randeep Ramesh in New Delhi 
January 11, 2008 
The Tata Group company in India is planning to 
produce the world’s cheapest car. The car, called 
the Nano, has no radio, no boot, no airbag, no 
mirror on the passenger’s side and just one 
long windscreen wiper. And if you want air-
conditioning for the hot summers in India, you will 
have to buy the more expensive deluxe model of 
the Nano. 
The Nano will be on sale later this year for 
100,000 rupees (£1,260). The aim of the Nano 
is to make it possible for the billion people who 
live in India to enjoy motoring for the first time. 
70-year-old Ratan Tata, the chairman of Tata, 
believes that the Nano is as important an event 
in the history of transport as the first flight or the 
first landing on the moon. But environmentalists 
say the new car will be a ‘nightmare’ and will 
make the air dirtier and cause traffic jams.
Like Henry Ford’s Model T Ford in the 1930s, 
Tata’s idea is to build a cheap car that is light and 
simple, but made from high-quality materials. The 
result is a small car which is just big enough for 
five people. The cheapest model is very basic: 
its price is low because it uses more plastic than 
steel. Other car manufacturers say the Nano 
may not meet safety standards, especially if 
the company plans to export it to Europe. Tata 
officials say it is easy to make the car stronger 
with metal plates to meet these safety standards.
Tata had the idea for the Nano four years ago but 
it has already brought big changes to the motor 
industry. Just a few days before Tata showed 
the car to the public for the first time, Ford said 
it was planning to increase its spending by 
$500m (£250m) a year to make India a centre of 
‘small-car manufacturing’. Last October, Renault 
said it was thinking about making a $5,000 car 
in India for export to the US. At first the Nano 
will only be on sale in India and experts say that 
India will soon be the fastest growing car market 
in the world. At the moment China is the fastest 
growing car market. 
The Tata chairman’s dream is a car for every 
Indian family. He says he used to watch families 
on motorbikes travelling through dusty streets: 
“The father driving the scooter, his young kid 
standing in front of him, his wife sitting behind 
him holding a baby. I wanted to make a safe, 
cheap, all-weather form of transport for families 
like these.”
The Nano costs just 100,000 rupees plus sales 
tax and is less than half the price of the next 
cheapest car on the road in India. It costs a bit 
more than a quality motorcycle. The economic 
boom in India means that people with money 
want to buy cars instead of motorcycles. If just 
10% of motorcycle owners buy a Nano, there will 
be 1m extra cars on India’s roads every year.
But environmentalists say the Nano could cause 
enormous damage to the environment. India’s 
largest cities are now covered in smog. In Delhi 
traffic now moves at less than nine miles an hour 
– half the speed of ten years ago. Traffic jams 
are getting worse and car travel in cities is getting 
slower. At the same time cars are producing 
more and more greenhouse gases. In 2005, cars, 
buses and lorries in India produced 219m tonnes 
of carbon dioxide. Experts say that will increase 
by almost 700% to 1,470 tonnes by 2035 if the 
number of cars continues to grow.
The motor industry says that only seven or 
eight out of every 1,000 people in India have a 
car. In America more than 500 in every 1,000 
people have a car. The number of private cars 
in India – about 13m – is only a little more than 
half the number of cars in America at the start 
of the 1930s. But the boom in motoring in India 
is already changing the shape of the country. 
Cities are growing into the countryside. The 
government is spending £35bn on new road