Chennai Runs out of Gas

Today the Chennai ran out of gas. By noon the few remaining pumps that were open had lines that wrapped around the block. A few, like the Indian Oil pump across from my house went for more than a mile. In the center of the city I passed a stalled Hyundai Santro with a woman in tears behind the wheel. She had run out of gas while going from station to station looking for a place to fill up. By ten at night, the few remaining pumps had police posted outside of them ready just in case a riot broke out. I saw people filling jugs for drinking water, apparently hoarding the fuel just in case the gas supply doesn't get turned back on.


I stopped at several different pumps and asked attendants why there was no gas and got conflicting answers. A police officer with several stars on his eppillete outside one bunk told me that there was a strike. Fed up by paying $5.30 a gallon, truck drivers refused to supply gas to stations across Tamil Nadu in a bid to the government to lower petrol prices. In a country where the median income still overs around $300 a year, the current price of petrol is far higher than just prohibitive, it's downright obscene. However another source at a local newspaper told me that gas supplies were slow to come in from abroad and that this could be a sign of things to come.

There is still no clear consensus about whether this is merely a blip, or the beginning of a trend in Tamil Nadu. I expect that the issue won't be resolved tomorrow. There will probably be a lot of stalled cars on the roads in a few days.

Could a Nano-Size Pricetag Mean Chaos?

The Tata Nano isn't just one more small car ready to enter the world's stream of endless transportation options; it's a revolution. Costing just a little over $2,500, it's half the price of the next cheapest car on the road today which means just about anyone with a mid-sized call center paycheck can pick one up. For this month's issue, WIRED sent me out to explore how the Nano will change the Indian economy. I tracked down powerful city planners and iconic environmentalists in Bangalore and sat inside a Nano prototype in the Tata factory in Pune. After criss crossing the country on the Nano-trail I think I have a good idea about what to expect when the car finally hits the roads. It's not a pretty picture.

On its own, the Nano is a great automobile. The engine is small and fuel efficient, it meets most environmental standards, and it is a whole lot safer than a motorcycle or scooter. But with 350,000 set to be produced in the first year, and untold millions in the years after that, the Nano portends a massive strain on India's already stressed infrastructure. The crux of the problem is that developing world governments aren't able to keep pace with private industry. There are already too many cars on the road and there don't seem to be plans to adapt to the coming influx.

We can't blame the Nano for being a cool car that a lot of people will want to buy--it is much nicer than the Maruti 800 which sells for $5000, and I'm beginning to think that it even puts my own Hyundai Santro to the test--but at the state level, there don't seem to be solutions in the works. At one level it is just a problem of geometry, as more people drift from two-wheelers to four wheelers, there will be less overall space for vehicles to navigate. At the same time, a lot fewer people are taking buses (who would want to when they are so cramped?). As citizens depend increasingly on private transportation the whole system tends towards gridlock.

And now that automakers know that it is possible to produce cars in the nano price range engineers from Germany to Japan are making plans to mass-assemble their own versions.

At $2,500 people who were never able to afford cars before suddenly can. According to figures I culled from World Bank data, the global pool of potential car owners could increase by as much as 800 million once ultra-compact cars are available world-wide.

This means big problems for administrators who are trying to keep developing world cities moving. Streets that are already clogged will get worse. Fuel prices that are already high will go higher.

Check out the story in this month's issue of WIRED. Or just click this link.

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In other news, I wasn't able to go to this year's SAJA awards in New York. That's a real shame because I was the finalist for the Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding Story about South Asia: the conference's top award.