A new survey has found that Jammu and Kashmir is one of the regions in India with a substantially higher ownership of cars. Others are Kerala, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Goa, including union territory of Ladakh and a few other North Eastern states. The data which has been made available by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare presents a huge disparity in car ownership across the country. It shows that fewer than 8 percent of households have a car.
There are two dimensions to this finding: one, the per capita ownership of the vehicles at the national level is surprisingly low. And this brings up the question: why do we encounter traffic gridlocks on the roads if fewer people own cars.
Another is about the states and the UTs with a higher per-capita car ownership: The question is whether the figure means that the people in these regions are more prosperous than those in others? It doesn’t necessarily. Maharashtra, India’s richest state, has just 8.7 percent per capita car ownership. Gujarat, also one of the richest states, has just 10.9 percent.
The takeaway from this is that it is not necessarily the prosperity that makes people buy cars but something more than this. And this ‘something’ can be a separate research subject. May be it has something to do with more per capita ownership of houses. Or may be it is a result of a less efficient public transport in some places. Or has something to do with the culture of a place. Nothing can be said conclusively.
Closer home, it has come as a surprise that the Valley is one of the places with the largest per capita ownership of cars. The trend of owning vehicles began in the Valley at the turn of the millienium and still continues. And one of its fallouts is visible on our roads. The peak traffic hours remain a horror across Srinagar. It takes hours to travel a distance of a few kilometers to work. A chaotic spectacle plays out on the streets every day. The reason is well-known: the city’s road length is not commensurate with the exponential growth in traffic volume.
The expansion of the city’s roads is desperately needed, not only with an eye to fix today’s problems but also to handle the future traffic of an ever-expanding city. Also contributing to this state of affairs is the inadequate public transport system. Higher per capita car ownership is both a good and a bad thing. It reflects growing prosperity among people but it also leads to traffic congestion on the roads and consequent pollution.
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