Mr. Gadkari, please allow automated cars.

http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/97379/ultimate-guide-to-autonomous-driving-pictures#0

 Mr. Nitin Gadkari, the Surface transport and highway minister, recently announced that driverless cars would not be allowed on Indian roads. The minister’s logic is that the driverless technology would take away jobs, therefore, it is not a good idea to have them on Indian roads.

The terminology driverless in itself is wrong. The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE International) classifies 6 levels, from 0 to 5, of automation in automobiles. On level 0 are automobiles in which machines would issue warnings to the driver. On level 1 the machines and the driver would share the driving job. Assisted parking is an example of level 1 and is available in top end cars. Level 2 is hands off, level 3 is eyes off, level 4 minds off and the level 5 is fully automated or the real driverless level. The ultimate goal in this area is to reach level 5. However, for all practical purposes, the innovators are trying to achieve level 2 and leve3. The talk of levels 4 and 5 are for technology demonstration and publicity purposes alone.  For safety reasons, cars having level 4 or 5 will have very limited application in near and medium term future.

Most technological innovations are incremental in nature. Most of the Indian cars are at level 0. It doesn’t make sense to disallow level 5 when we are at the level 0. Disallowing it only means that the government, as of now, is averse to increasing automation in the automobile sector.

We Indians are always averse to automation as we worry that it would take away jobs. In the early eighties, all trade unions mostly supported by left parties went on a general strike to stop the introduction of computing technology in the banking sector. What happened? It delayed but couldn’t stop automation. And, the delay had its own cost.  We should remember that no one is born as a driver, a clerk or a teacher. We are all trainable. We can learn to do new jobs. The responsibility of the government is to facilitate that training. It should leave it to the market to sort out whether the technology is good enough to survive or not.

When a new technology comes into being, it creates winners and losers. When we move from level 0 to 2 or 3, some of the drivers may lose their jobs but many would get jobs in the IT industry. Given that India is the market leader in IT services having more than half of the world share, this movement will bring many jobs to the IT sector. I am not saying that the government should not think about drivers who may lose their jobs. Rather than stopping a new technology, the government should focus on training and equipping those drivers so that they earn their livelihood in the changed environment.


We don’t have any autonomous cars in India. However, the regular taxi drivers have already started losing their jobs. The advent of aggregators such as Uber and Ola brought a new category of drivers: part time drivers. Many of them are students or have other jobs. They got into this part time profession because it is economically beneficial. They would change to something else if this market stops rewarding them adequately. Some of the ‘kali-pili’ (black-yellow) taxi drivers have already lost their job but it doesn’t imply that the aggregator should not be allowed to function in the market.

I am not averse to the government playing a role in the market. But, the role has to be either of a regulator or of a facilitator. The government should not try to become a player. Minister Gadkari also promised that the government would come up with an aggregator platform which taxi drivers could use. This doesn’t make any sense to me.  Even the government has realized that the public enterprises rarely become good players in the market. That is the reason, our government is trying to get out from many businesses such as air transport and hospitality.  On the other side, Mr. Gadkari is talking about entering into another business. The government should act as the referee, as the rule maker, as the regulator rather than aspiring to become a player in the market. A player with a vested interest in the system can never be a good referee.

Even if the minister doesn’t ban this new autonomous technology, given the condition of our roads and traffic, he’ll have his wish come true. This would be really sad for the country.  The government should try to facilitate the entry of this autonomous technology as there are economic gains to be made. After all, stopping the introduction of a new technology is not good for the economy.

Modi, Yogi and the BJP

(Image taken from  http://www.logicalbharat.com/yogi-modi/)

Let me stick my neck out and say that there was no ‘Tsunamo', a portmanteau of Tsunami and Modi indicating the swell caused by Modi’s charisma alone, in the UP election. Let me also be clear that I am not trying to deny that Modi is immensely popular and contributed significantly to the BJP’s win in  UP. However,  Modi should not be given the sole credit as the term Tsunamo indicates. The BJP won as it was able to crack the winning formula and, more importantly, there was no united opposition. And, of course, Modi’s charisma was important for the formula.

The role of the absence of the united opposition is easier to understand. The SP got 21.8%, the BSP got 22.2% and the Congress got 6.2% of all votes. If they had come together, it could be said that their collective vote share would have been 50.2%, enough to decimate the BJP (worse than Bihar) in the first-past-the-post system. We shall come back to this point later.

The notion of the winning formula is more complex and, more importantly, it raises the question what stopped other parties from coming up with the winning formula.

Indian polity revolves around emotive, cultural and societal issues and not around economic issues. Religious sentiments (represented by Kamandal) and caste equations (represented by Mandal) are two such non-economic issues which have dominated the Indian polity for the last 25-30 years.  It is to the credit of  Modi that he made ‘achchhe din’ (representing development, an economic issue) as one of the important poll planks in the 2014 general election. Unlike many economic activities in which all participants gain, an election is a zero-sum game, meaning the win for one indicates the loss for all others. When Modi’s ‘achhe din’ was pitted against Nitish’s ‘sushashan’ in the 2015 Bihar election, the later with the help of opposition unity and caste arithmetic was able to defeat him. The BJP and Modi realized that development alone is not enough to win elections. It has to be supported by emotive issues and caste calculations.

In the 2017 UP election, BJP paid attention not only to the development plank and used Modi’s charisma but also to caste calculations at the constituency and district levels. What also worked in BJP’s favor is the availability of a cadre of volunteers belonging to the RSS to do booth level vote management. The absence of these volunteers in Bihar election cost the BJP dearly. The BJP win in this UP election can very well be attributed to the carefully crafted winning formula which was a combination of Mandal, Kamandal, and the hope for development which was backed by Modi’s charisma from the top and the RSS volunteers on the ground.

The RSS volunteers have been doing the lion share of ground work.  The RSS has a very pronounced cultural agenda. And, given their contribution to the electoral win, it is not possible for the BJP to ignore their right to weigh in heavily on the choice of the chief minister.

Yogi Adityanath represents this agenda in the BJP. It is no wonder that he has been given two deputies: Keshav Prasad Maurya to satisfy and represent the polity motivated by Mandal arguments, and Dinesh Sharma to represent the organizational side of the BJP and satisfy the Brahmins.

It is too early to say how the new ruling dispensation in Uttar Pradesh will turn out to be. Will they be able to take ‘sabka sath’ (everyone along) and do ‘sabka vikas’ (development for all)? Or, will they cater to the Kamandal and Mandal constituencies only?

If we look at the past RSS nominees for the post of chief ministers, we can clearly put them in two categories: 1. Who learned to look beyond the RSS, and  2. Who could not look beyond the RSS and caste politics. In the first category, we have Modi and  Shivraj Chauhan; and in the second category, we have Kalyan Singh and Uma Bharati.  Modi started his political career on the Kamandal plank: overa period, he metamorphosed into a Vikash Purush (a man for development) and again, after demonetization, into a ‘garibo ka messiah’ (savior of the poor). The same is true for Shivraj Chauhan and Raman Singh. These people continue to have long tenures.  Kalyan Singh and Uma Bharati failed to move beyond Mandal and Kamandal and, consequently, had short-lived tenures.

Successful politicians anticipate and shape the mood of the public and change their persona accordingly. Only time can tell whether Yogi would be able to reinvent himself or remain a prisoner of his current persona of a firebrand Hindu leader.

I am not saying that the Indian polity would suddenly move away from Kamandal and Mandal. Their importance in Indian elections cannot be denied. Just look at vote share of major parties in UP: irrespective of the winner, the BSP and the SP and the BJP have constantly received votes greater than 20 % each. However, the role of development would become gradually more and more important. All political parties talk about it. As 20% vote does not guarantee a win, you need a development agenda in addition to religious and caste calculations. As more development happens, the size of the middle class will increase. For them, Mandal and Kamandal may or may not remain important but their expectation for improved public services and its delivery and better law and order would definitely rise. Thus, my belief is that we have entered a cycle which is slow but virtuous.  In this cycle, all political parties will pay some attention to Vikas (development). Without Vikas, it would be difficult for them to come back to power.


If the BJP wants to win the next general election, it has to balance Mandal and Kamandal with a significant dose of development. If Yogi fails to reinvent himself, he would provide a platform for most of the opposition parties to unite against the BJP. The electoral math would become difficult for Modi to surmount. If Yogi goes through a successful metamorphosis, he would be able to pull traditional voters of the opposition parties (particularly of the BSP) in the BJP fold, and the BJP will have a great chance of succeeding in 2019.