Nobel cause

text of the letter sent to the press:

Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the Chairman of the Nobel Laureate, IPCC, when asked to comment on the TATA '1- lakh car' project, in the context of the adverse remarks made by the famed economist, Thomas Friedman, expressed his wish that TATA's would simultaneously get into public bus transport services. And, TATA's being TATA's would be happy to do so, provided the government facilitated their entry. Also, so would the house of TVS, who anyway started off as public bus service providers in the city of Madurai, but had to give it up because of nationalisation during emergency. The liberalisation thereafter has been token at best, leading to a situation where the organised sector would rather keep away totally, leaving it all in the hands of the 'blue-line' kind of operators, apart from the only slightly better government agencies, with disastrous consequences.

The sad irony however is that whereas it is in vital infrastructure sectors such as public bus transport services that the country so desperately needs the efficiencies of the organised sector players like TATA's and TVS's, in order to contain the ever increasing damage to the environment apart from the cluttering of the cities, they have willy-nilly landed up doing exactly the opposite, by producing more and more cars and motor-bikes.

The Nobel prize bestows a responsibility upon Dr Pachauri to correct this anomaly.