THIS is not an advertorial for REVA, India's first electric car, made in Bangalore. This is about the government's hypocricy, its bending backwards to please the petrol-diesel car lobby backwards to please the petrol-diesel car lobby and most of all the negative attitude of industry to innovation. On March 21, Chief Minister S.M. Krishan announced a Green Tax in his budget. It meant that owners of vehicles that were over 15 years old would have to pay a Green Tax that would be earmarked for pollution control measures!

SIMPLE QUESTIONS:

1. Why collect a tax at all from polluting vehicles?

2. Shouldn't they be sent to the scrap yard?

3. What purpose is served if you collect a Green Tax and continue to allow highly polluting BCC, BMTC, autorickshaw and assorted 15-year old vehicles to ply on our roads?

There are no answers forthcoming.

On the other hand, we have a young engineer named Chetan Maini of the Maini Group. He studied engineering at the universities of Michigan and Stanford worked for five years with General Motors and Amerigon Inc., developed six electric, solar and hybrid-electric vehicles. Holds a US Patent on RF Energy Management System for electric vehicles.

And fired by nationalistic zeal returns to hometown Bangalore to design a car for Indian roads. The car is an ideal city car. (Of course it can do with upgrades.) But there is no encouragement forthcoming from any quarter, neither the government nor the people, except from a few hundred caring citizens.

The government did promise a subsidy, period. The public would rather purchase a Maruti 800 or an Indica or any other car in that price range than the smaller REVA that is priced just as much.

All over the world, governments are falling over themselves, encouraging entrepreneurs, even the manufacturers of big brands like Ford, Opel, Toyota, Mitsubishi, Volvo, Fiat to design cars that will work on alternative fuels, including solar and electric. Chetan has just been awarded the Young Entrepreneurs Organisation's Thomas Alva Edison Award for innovation in Mexico City.

The globally respected awards are based on three of Edison's principles - 'Fail your way to Success', 'Stop innovation and start playing' and 'Limitation is a springboard to greater creativity.' Chetan is doing all he can to make his dream a reality - to produce cars that will be priced right and are zero-polluters.

REVA has everything right, but the price. "I want to make bigger cars," he says. In London, Paris and elsewhere, electric car owners don't have to pay parking fees, there are many centres where the cars can be 'refuelled' and most of all there is a subsidy for the manufacturers.

Out here, there's lots of criticism from armchair experts and possibly the killing of a great idea.

- Allen J. Mendonca