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India's Transport Minister Vows To Ban Self-Driving Cars To Save Jobs (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Companies in the United States, Germany, Japan, and other countries are racing to develop self-driving cars. But India's top transportation regulator says that those cars won't be welcome on Indian streets any time soon. "We won't allow driverless cars in India," said Nitin Gadkari, India's minister for Road Transport, Highways, and Shipping, according to the Hindustan Times. "I am very clear on this. We won't allow any technology that takes away jobs." Gadkari is taking a very different approach from politicians in the United States, where both the Obama and Trump administrations have been keen to promote the development of self-driving vehicles. "We are bullish on automated vehicles," said Obama Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx last year. His successor, Elaine Chao, has also signaled support for self-driving technology, while also expressing concerns about safety risks and potential job losses.
I don't think India is at risk of having any self-driving cars any time soon. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've read more than one account of India's roads, and last I heard they were still a chaotic nightmare most places, where the rules of the road are barely even suggestions, let alone guidelines. That's not an environment a robot can be expected to function well in, if at all. Unless Indians somehow Westernized their vehicular behavior in the past year, there's no risk at all of self-driving vehicles showing up there. Quite aside from the price of the extra equipment. India is still the place that wants and needs to build sub-$6000 vehicles. There's not a lot of room in that budget for servos and sensors.
India's Transport Minister is grandstanding in the best tradition of government ministers everywhere, "solving" a nonexistent problem.
As an Indian, I'm horrified at this. While I appreciate that India is very far from deploying any driverless cars, to enforce a policy forbidding the tech is really short sighted. If we listen to Gadkari and his like, all administrative work should be done with pen and paper, all accounting should be entered manually into a ledger, all farming should be done by pulling a plow manually. It is rather unfortunate that someone like him is in power.