The future of driverless car in India looks bleak. Union Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari said that the government will not allow driverless cars in India.
Nitin Gadkari said in a statement,
We won’t allow driverless cars in India. I am very clear on this. We won’t allow any technology that takes away jobs. In a country where you have unemployment, you can’t have a technology that ends up taking people’s jobs.
He further stated that India suffers a huge shortage of 22 lakh drivers and that cab aggregators like Uber and Ola take advantage of these. The government is working on opening a number of training facilities across the country in order to get 5,000 more professional drivers on the road over the next few years, he added. He said that the government will promote electric vehicles but would not allow its imports and rather would urge all major automobile companies to manufacture this as per ‘Make in India’ drive. Moreover, the government is planning to introduce and make GPS and satellite tracking mandatory in all public and private vehicles.
Tesla Motors, China’s Baidu, Google, Uber, Mercedes, Ford and General Motors are working on driverless cars, which are already being tested in cities across the world.