New Delhi: Union Minister Hardeep Singh Puri has suggested that the sale of cars has gone down due to more people using the subway and cab aggregators Ola and Uber.
Hardeep Puri’s remarks come weeks after Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the slowdown in the automobile sector was due to many factors like the change in mindset of millennials, who now prefer taxi aggregators like Ola and Uber instead of committing for monthly installments to own a car. Her remarks had come in for criticism from various quarters.
The Minister for Civil Aviation and Housing and Urban Affairs Hardeep Puri , while speaking at the launch of the book ‘Sikh Heritage of Nepal’ at Sapru House here, said there is talk of economic slowdown and he is one of those who always acknowledges a problem.
“To tell you the story on cars, yes there is a growth and sometimes there is a slowdown. But look at the picture in totality, when I became a Minister for Urban Affairs the total number of people who used to ride the Delhi Metro was 2.4 million in a day, you know what it is today, it is over six million,” Puri told the gathering.
“If you look at what Ola and Uber do. Now it stands to reason that when you transit from being a developing country to like…how many of us in New York used our own cars, I did not have a car. If you wanted to get around somewhere you took a metro or a public transport or hailed a cab,” added Puri.
Talking about the Urban Affairs Ministry, Puri said India will have 600 million people living in urban spaces by 2030.
“Seventy per cent of the India of 2030 is still to be built. A study showed that every year India has to construct something between 700-900 million sq metres of urban space – which is equivalent of one Chicago every year and that is what is happening,” informed Puri.
PTI