Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Indian car manufacturers are selling vehicles de-
signed for emerging markets around the world. Some
8 million Indian households are able to afford a car in the
US$5,000-8,000 range. Maruti-Suzuki, India' s largest car
maker, is meeting their needs with its Maruti models.
Pitching to an even lower income strata, Tata motors had
released a bare-bones car called the “Nano” that is selling
for US$2,200. (This is a fortune in India.) Tata Motors
has also bought the British companies Jaguar and Land
Rover. India' is automobile industry is predicted to overtake
South Korea' s by 2015.
India still has problems in its manufacturing sector.
Its infrastructure is rickety and high tariffs on many
imported products saddle manufacturers with bloated
costs. Nevertheless, as of 2003, India' s economy has been
growing at a rate of 7.5 percent a year. A slowdown has
ensued in the current economic downturn and the rate of
growth in 2009 was 6.1 percent. Even so, India now has
the second fastest growing economy in the world after
China.
India' is economy is rapidly becoming more
enmeshed in the larger Asian economy . Japan now invests
more in India than anywhere else. It has also promised
to finance a Mumbai-Delhi industrial corridor. South
Korea has entered the Indian market with its LG elec-
tronic brands. LG advertises its products in a dozen In-
dian languages. Meanwhile, India is investing in
Southeast Asia.
The government has also come up with a plan for
Special Economic Zones (SEZs) like those in China.
However, the idea of SEZs has come under stiff opposi-
tion from a variety of government, social activists, and
environmental groups who envision loss of farmland and
natural habitat. The plans are currently frozen.
The project will expand city hinterlands, link once
remote towns and villages to markets, speed up economic
interchange, and accelerate rural-urban migration.
Millions of Indians travel by train. Boarding a train
is a major accomplishment. I remember journeying
from Delhi to V aranasi. At each stop police were literally
beating the hopefuls with sticks to prevent them from
trampling each other. Windows have bars to stop
people from crawling in. With the exception of upper-
class seating, the carriages are bulging with humanity .
Male passengers hang onto the window bars and sit on
the roofs. Ticket-takers roughly push through the
masses.
Three million individuals commute from Mumbai' s
suburbs to work every day . At peak hours, 5,000 cling to
the trains designed for 1,700. Hundreds fall off and are
killed on the tracks every year. Clearly , huge improve-
ments in urban infrastructures are essential.
Getting Energy
THE PETROLEUM BACKBONE
The petroleum industry forms the backbone of India' s
national economy . One of the oldest oil fields in the
world was established in 1889 at Dibrugrh in Asom.
Exploration and discovery expanded from the folded
mountainous regions to the alluvium-covered shelf in
the Brahmaputra V alley . After independence, exploration
was expanded to nearly all the sedimentary basins of the
country . Several discoveries of oil and gas were made in
the Bombay Basin (Gujarat), Assam and Arakan Basin,
and the Bombay Offshore Basin. In the 1990s, additional
fields were discovered offshore Mumbai (Bombay). The
“Bombay High” is located 161 miles off the coast of
Mumbai and produces half of India' s oil but only 15 percent
of its requirements.
Another recent development has been to commer-
cialize reserves of natural gas. Over the years there has
been a significant shift in the domestic pattern of energy
consumption. In 1947, more than two-thirds of India' s
total energy consumption was of noncommercial fuels
such as wood, harvest waste, animal dung, and commer-
cial coal. Now , natural gas provides more than half of
India' s commercial energy , and the private sector has
diversified into infrastructure construction, marketing,
import facilities, pipeline manufacturing, and the
production of an array of byproducts such as naptha,
toluene, and lube oil.
Getting Around the Country
India' s roads are notorious for being jagged and pot-
holed. Road linkages between the country' s 41 metropol-
itan areas are grossly inadequate. I took a bus from Delhi
to Agra and remember the journey as a life-threatening
experience. Along the way , I counted seven trucks and
buses that had apparently fallen off the road where it had
broken away .
Now , India is building a nationwide four-lane
expressway that will link the major nodes in its urban
system: Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Chennai. Fifteen
additional cities will be woven into this national trans-
port web called the Golden Quadrilateral (Figure 8-17).
 
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