Recently, Mr. Thomas Friedman published an article titled "No, No, No, Don't Follow America", an article on how the Tata Nano is a bad idea. While I do agree with his views mostly, there is only thing I find wrong about the article. And that is his comparison of the Transport system with the Cellphone revolution in India.

 

If you observe the Cell-phone penetration in India and why it "leapfroged" over traditional land lines... laying traditional landlines involves a lot of work and needs a lot of land. This involves govt sanctions etc. basically a slow lengthy process filled with Govt bureaucracy and the resulting corruption. Cell-phones on the other hand don't need all of that. A few towers that can be raised over private buildings and small pieces of land do the job. Hence Indian Entrepreneurs found this to be the easy route to fill the "communication gap" in India.

 

Unfortunately, transportation does not have the luxury of this shortcut. You will have to deal with Govt. for any infrastructure. The only way out is that the Tatas and the Reliances take up the job of building end-to-end transportation infrastructure as a business. But that would mean privatization of the country's governance which will go against Democracy and result in Monopolization.

 

Hence, in my honest opinion, comparing mass-transit infrastructure to the Cell-phone revolution is not a good comparison.