The Global Sociology Blog

First, this item from the Guardian:

“After years of secret preparation, the world’s cheapest car will be unveiled in Delhi this week – delighting millions of Indians as much as it is horrifying environmentalists.

At 100,000 rupees (£1,290), the People’s Car, designed and manufactured by Tata, is being marketed as a safer way of travelling for those who until now have had to transport their families balanced on the back of their motorbikes.

Ratan Tata, 70, chairman of the family-run business, who has spearheaded the race for a cut-price car, wrote on the company website: ‘That’s what drove me – a man on a two-wheeler with a child standing in front, his wife sitting behind, add to that the wet roads – a family in potential danger.’

But Tata hopes also to create a ‘new market for cars which does not exist’, making them accessible to India’s booming middle classes made recently rich by an economy growing at around 9 per cent a year. This rapidly expanding market is potentially extremely lucrative; consultants McKinsey predict that the size of the Indian middle class will grow from 50 million now to 583 million by 2025.

Last year just over one million cars and seven million motorbikes were sold in India. Tata wants to transform some of those motorbike buyers into car owners and believes that the company can eventually sell up to a million People’s Cars a year. Analysts say the project could revolutionise car prices, not just in India, but globally. Several other manufacturers have similar products in the pipeline.

These figures alarm environmentalists, already concerned by the congestion and rising pollution levels in India’s overcrowded cities.“

That’s a $2,500 car.

Item number 2 from the French newspaper Le Monde, scientists are already planning for a post-asphalt future. First, the goal is to recycle and reuse 100% of old and damaged asphalt (rather than the current 30% recycling rate). Second, research is going on to come up with new composites based on organic components such as sunflower or canola. Third, there is also research being done regarding the process of deploying such components without using heat (to pollute less). Such “smart roads” also include research into thermo-sensitive composites that detect the air temperature and change the color of the road accordingly as well as composites that would detect “abnormal” driving patterns.

Both items reflect a debate that goes on in international development circles: the priorities of the peripheral countries are different than those of core countries. Investment money goes into different projects. Environmental objections to turning a lot of Indians into automobile drivers, and more generally, Western injunctions to peripheral countries to pay more attention to sustainability in their development are seen as neo-imperialism. In the context of limited capital available for investment, such injunctions are seen as attempts to stall development.

On the other hand, there is obviously a need for cutting edge research that assumes we are going to run out of oil in a near future. There is need for capital in these fields, and that can only come from core countries.

This does not need to be an either/or proposition. Obviously, sustainable development should be the goal. Technology transfer from the core to the periphery as well as economic cooperation seem the obvious path.