From Chanakya to Modi

IN 2015, A Delhi-based motor accidents tribunal adjudicated that animal-driven, slow-moving vehicles (or bullock carts) often caused serious accidents. Instead of banning these vehicles from the road, the court simply asked for them to be regulated.1 The story serves as a metaphor for India’s tendency to add the new to the old, instead of replacing it. A century after the first motor car appeared on the streets of India, bullock carts, animals (cows, buffaloes and dogs) and humans still share the same streets with motor vehicles. In most countries, horsedriven carriages disappeared within a few years of the arrival of motor cars. As recently as the 1980s, one of India’s leading technical schools, the Indian Institute of Management, even had a project to build a better bullock cart that would carry heavier loads but with less wear and tear for the bullocks.2