Delhi Offers Cleaner Auto Rickshaws, but Residents Choose Cars

Photograph by Gurinder Osan, AP

Along Delhi’s traffic-snarled streets, three-wheeled motorized rickshaws dodge and dart amid the swarms of diesel-belching cars and trucks. Years ago, India’s second-largest city hoped that by requiring auto rickshaws to run on clean-burning natural gas, it could solve pollution concerns, while supporting growing transport needs.

Delhi now boasts of one of the world’s largest fleets of vehicles fueled with compressed natural gas (CNG), but the city’s transport woes proceed.

Each day, hundreds of thousands of commuters stand on Delhi’s treacherous roads, scrambling to find an available three-wheeler at a fair price. The headache of urban transportation drives even more Delhi dwellers to buy cars, feeding a perverse cycle that further worsens congestion. Delhi alone has eleven percent of the nation’s private vehicles but just 1.Four percent of the population. Think tanks, city governments, and entrepreneurs say boosting auto rickshaw use could help reduce dependency on cars and improve air quality.

But finding the right mix of policy and incentives has been a fight, especially when many among the growing middle class in India consider car ownership a status symbol as much as a transport solution. But without major reforms in transportation—including investment in short-haul solutions such as cleaner-burning auto rickshaws-the snarl of cars and lung-burning pollution in Indian cities will quickly get worse, as the nation’s urban population swells from a total of three hundred forty million people today to a projected five hundred ninety million by 2030.

Auto rickshaws, also called “tuk-tuks,” or just “autos,” are motorized versions of the three-wheeled pulled or cycle rickshaws that long have provided essential transportation across the developing world. As their numbers grew in India’s cities, so did concerns about the pollution spewed by their typical diesel-fueled two-stroke engines. Elementary and cheap two-stroke engines, common in chainsaws and lawnmowers, cause higher emissions than the four-stroke engines used in cars due to incomplete combustion.

The Delhi government sought to deal with this issue by taking steps to convert auto rickshaws within the city to cleaner-burning CNG. But at the same time, a one thousand nine hundred ninety seven Supreme Court decision, citing pollution concerns, capped their number at 55,000. But that policy treatment has proven problematic in a city that includes the nation’s capital, Fresh Delhi, and with a skyrocketing population of eleven million that is 2nd in India only to Mumbai’s. The number of private cars is growing prompt and there are fewer rickshaws than needed to meet request. In November 2011, the Supreme Court lifted its cap, a stir that will permit 45,000 more auto rickshaws onto Delhi’s streets. With almost all of Delhi’s motorized three-wheelers running on CNG and most of them using four-stroke engines, the hope is that the puny private taxis will truly be a cleaner solution.

Advocates point to the success of entrepreneurs like 26-year-old Sulabh Mehra, who embarked up his pioneering Radio Tuk-Tuk business, just outside Delhi, in the sprawling suburb of Gurgaon, two years ago. His innovation was to suggest a dial-up service supplied previously only by utter taxis. Instead of flagging rickshaws on the street, commuters could dial direct for a rickshaw rail.

“Commuting is a major issue in Gurgaon,” says Mehra. “We service the last mile [of] connectivity from your home to public transportation. For longer distances, prearranged “autos” [rickshaws] can cut back on cab use.”

Mehra’s distinct, bright-red autos stand out from the standard green-and-yellow ones that whirr through Gurgaon. His fleet has doubled to one hundred auto rickshaws in two years, transporting about 1,000 people a day in the suburb of more than one million people. A virtually untapped market, clearly, there is business potential. Similar models have popped up across India.

But getting people to give up their coveted cars in favor of bumpy, open-air tin rickshaws won’t be effortless. About 1,200 fresh cars hit the streets of Delhi each day. Horn-slamming taxis, luxury sedans, and SUVs take up about ninety percent of the road space, but cater to less than twenty percent of the transportation request.

“Why would I want to take an “auto” [rickshaw] when it is a giant hassle?” asks Preethi Bansal. Her family is part of India’s thriving middle class. They live about a mile from the Delhi metro but have four cars for their family of five.

To discourage car use and boost rickshaws, “tax policies need to switch,” says Akshay Mani, of the sustainable transport nonprofit EMBARQ. “People who choose to drive a car should pay higher taxes and parking fees,” he says. Instead, the government strenuously subsidizes diesel fuel, leading citizens to opt for cars that run on one of the messiest fuels available.

In 2000, diesel cars accounted for just four percent of India’s market. They now make up forty percent of fresh car sales, and soon are expected to hit fifty percent.

“Commuters need to have viable options of transport other than cars,” says Mani, who explored the potential of auto rickshaws as a solution in a February report on India’s urban transport for the World Resources Institute. Mani wrote that by making rickshaws safer and enhancing the distance they could travel, the government can make them a sustainable part of the transport system. In an analysis of several Indian cities, Mani’s report demonstrated that auto rickshaws are playing a significant role as a transportation option, accounting for inbetween ten and twenty percent of daily trips made on motorized road transport, even tho’ they account for just two to eleven percent of the total number of motor vehicles.

The Supreme Court’s decision to lift the cap on the number of auto rickshaws in Delhi is designed “to cater to the ever-growing request,” says the city’s head transport secretary, R Chandramoihan. Experts have welcomed the shift in policy and intention, telling it can’t come soon enough.

“Investment in an improved transport sector has been much slower in Delhi [than elsewhere in India],” says, Anumita Roychowdhury, executive director at the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment. “Delhi has been car-centric with a phenomenal expansion in bridges and highways.”

But not everyone is wooed the needed reforms will take place, or if they do, that they will switch much in the end. Corruption is a problem, with drivers often paying thousands of rupees [1,000 rupees equal about $Nineteen] for a Delhi rickshaw permit on the black market, and five times the usual cost for the actual rickshaw vehicle. This often translates into higher fares for commuters.

“I don’t see any switch happening,” says Rakesh Agarwal, head of the Nyaya Boomi nonprofit, which is working to promote rickshaw drivers’ rights. “There is a mafia that runs the rickshaw business in Delhi and they are not likely to let [a fresh influx of competitors into the market]”

Mehra of Radio Tuk Tuk agrees. While his Gurgaon business has been a success, he says he is prevented from expanding into Delhi because of mafia control and high rickshaw prices.

Meantime, the number of cars increase and the pollution problem worsens.

Commuters’ lungs burn and their chests tighten as they breathe Delhi’s noxious air, rife with toxic particulates in concentrations five times higher than those deemed safe by the World Health Organization. India has the world’s worst air pollution, worse than China’s, says a January explore by researchers from Yale and Columbia universities who track air pollution by satellite.

Those who suffer most are the elderly, sick, and youthful. Acute respiratory infections are contributing to more child deaths each year, says Dr. S.K. Kabra, a respiratory physician at Delhi’s main hospital, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences.

Outside Kabra’s office, hundreds of parents line up with their children, coughing and fighting to breathe as they wait for appointments. One by one, he listens to their chests. Through frequent checkups, he hopes to keep these kids from becoming another grave statistic. More than thirteen percent of children under five die in hospital care for respiratory infections in India, according to the World Health Organization, tho’ there are likely many more cases that go unreported.

“Pollution increases the morbidity, increases the frequency, increases the severity,” Kabra says. “We need to improve our environment to improve the health of our people in India.”

Delhi is looking at a multitude of solutions, including scaling up the public transport system of buses and commuter trains, improving walking and cycling infrastructure, as well as making parking reforms and adding more transit-oriented development. Delhi’s master plan, in fact, has set a target of eighty percent of trips by public transportation by 2020, compared to about forty percent today. This would mark a significant switch in current trends, with auto rickshaw journeys growing at about five percent, while private car and motorbike trips are moving ahead at twelve percent and fifteen percent annually.

An auto rickshaw strategy will be an essential element of this effort, experts say. But they say Delhi will require aggressive act on many fronts to protect its economy and citizens from being gasped by road congestion.

This story is part of a special series that examines energy issues. For more, visit The Excellent Energy Challenge.

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