Concrete actions help, not words: Maruti Chairman

Maruti Suzuki India Chairman RC Bhargava on Wednesday said that while a lot of statements were made by government officials supporting the automobile industry, but when it comes to taking actual steps nothing has really happened. Speaking at industry body SIAM's 61st annual convention, the veteran industry leader noted that the automobile sector in the country was at a very crucial juncture with declining fortunes in the last few years and it would not revive either with conventional engine vehicles, CNG, biofuels or EVs, unless the question of affordability of cars for the customer is addressed. "We have been going through a situation where this industry has been declining over a long period of time. And despite various very important people in government, we just heard Amitabh Kant (NITI Aayog CEO)... There have been a lot of statements made about the importance of the automobile industry. But in terms of concrete actions, which would reverse the decline in trend, I haven't seen any action on the ground," Bhargava said.

"I am afraid words don't get us very much in the terms of extra sales but you need concrete action to make this happen," Bhargava noted. He pondered whether this kind of outlook for the industry culminates from the old belief that car industry and passenger cars were a luxury product, to be owned only by the rich. "Because if the mindsets have changed, I think people planners, economists, thinkers, writers, journalists, everybody should have been worried long ago about what was happening to the growth of the automobile industry....," he said. The figures are there for everybody to see but no measures taken to rectify the situation. "I am sorry to say that there are very few steps taken that could reverse this trend. And that is what worries me," he noted. Bhargava stated that the car industry in India actually became a model industry and started growing after Maruti came into existence. "The change in policy to set up a public sector company to make cars was not because there was a change of thinking amongst the planners that we need a car industry to grow our economy to grow manufacturing, like what happened in the United States or in the UK, or Germany or France or Italy, or Japan or Korea or even China, that kind of thing did not happen," he noted.