- Saturday, April 20, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
RC BHARGAVA, the chairman of Maruti Suzuki India, the country’s biggest carmaker, on Wednesday (25) said while a lot of statements were made by government officials supporting the automobile industry, nothing has really happened in reality.
Speaking at SIAM’s (Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers) 61st annual convention which was held online, the veteran industry leader said India’s automobile sector was at a very crucial juncture with declining fortunes in the last few years and it would revive either with conventional engine vehicles, CNG, biofuels or electric vehicles, unless the question of affordability for the customers is taken care of.
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“We have been going through a situation where this industry has been declining over a long period of time. And despite various very important people in government, we just heard Mr. Amitabh Kant (NITI Aayog CEO)… There have been a lot of statements made about the importance of the automobile industry. But in terms of concrete actions, which would reverse the decline in trend, I haven’t seen any action on the ground,” Bhargava said.
“I am afraid words don’t get us very much in terms of extra sales but you need concrete action to make this happen,” Bhargava, 87, said.
He also wondered whether such an outlook for the industry culminated from the old belief that the car industry and passenger cars were a luxury product which is only owned by the rich.
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“Because if the mindsets have changed, I think people planners, economists, thinkers, writers, journalists, everybody should have been worried long ago about what was happening to the growth of the automobile industry….,” he said.
“I am sorry to say that there are very few steps taken that could reverse this trend. And that is what worries me,” he added.
Bhargava said the car industry in India became a model industry and started growing after Maruti made entry.
“The change in policy to set up a public sector company to make cars was not because there was a change of thinking amongst the planners that we need a car industry to grow our economy to grow manufacturing, like what happened in the United States or in the UK, or Germany or France or Italy, or Japan or Korea or even China, that kind of thing did not happen,” he noted.
Bhargava said that the auto industry has developed in India so much because people in the country aspire to own a car and not because there was a deliberate policy which led this to happen.
“And which again, I think supports my view that the change in the mindset of planners about the importance of the car industry and generally of the automobile industry, remains confined to words and doesn’t get translated into action,” he said, adding, “The situation today is that if we take into account what has happened in the last 18 months of COVID, already, the industry actually is on a decline if you look at the last five years, and how to reverse this.”
The man also said that he supports the fact that customers in India should get safe and clean vehicles but mentioned that it is important to also think how cars are made affordable with a much lower income level that exists in India.
