Sitharaman’s attempt to blame millennials and now Goyal urging Indians to not do math may be innocuous if not scary

From millennials to mathematics, the search for scapegoats for the economic crisis continues. In desperation, a dead man might soon face the music as well. In the meantime, there appears to be no hunt for solutions to the economic malaise that we are in and this now increasingly appears to be a clear case of the pigeons coming home to roost. In this case, that would have to be   demonetisation. However, it is rather amusing that Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman chose to blame millennials for the car sales slowdown and also the increasing preference that these young people show for taxi services offered through ride-hailing applications such as Ola and Uber. Incidentally, taxi aggregators engage drivers who mostly deploy Maruti cars. Meanwhile, Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal felt facts and figures never mattered in understanding the “gravity” of the prevalent economic scenario.

There is no doubt that ride-hailing applications have made a difference to urban life in the country but a couple of things must be remembered why we use them. First, most Indian cities have a very poor public transport system. Also, in several cities, particularly in the National Capital Region (NCR), there was no history of hailing a taxi down to travel. Little neighbourhood taxi wallahs were the only hope. The ride-hailing services turned that upside down. For journeys after a party or maybe to travel to a commercial area where parking is difficult to come by, these services make sense. But for longer distances and crossing borders, a cost-benefit study and usage analysis will show that they are far from replacing car ownership. True, a car is still a large capital expense but if millennials are not buying them, it is a bit rich to blame Ola and Uber. Millennials, the marketing term for those born between 1980 and 2000 approximately, depending on which advertising maven you ask, are not buying cars because affordability is an issue. That is because jobs for starters are getting increasingly difficult to come by as the economy stalls. This lack of confidence in purchasing power is leading to a cycle of negativity which might lead to troubles beyond a cyclical slowdown and to something worse, a structural slowdown. Make no mistakes, for many Indians in large cities and small towns, owning a private vehicle — whether it is a car or a two-wheeler — is a functional requirement to be a productive member of society. In addition, for those climbing up the social and economic ladder, owning a car remains to be something aspirational as the country’s largest carmaker Maruti-Suzuki has highlighted. This is also reflected by the fact that the second-hand car market is booming by all indications. The slowing economy is failing to create enough jobs for the millennials and there is no escaping that. The slowdown has meant that students, who entered the job market in 2018 and 2019, have not found jobs and the Class of 2020 is looking fearfully at the coming months. And if you don’t have a job, maybe you shouldn’t buy a car. The crisis in the auto industry, or for that matter the economy, is not about lopsided demand and supply. It’s a warning bell for big bang structural reforms and better policies for the manufacturing sector. There’s a need to perk up the small and medium enterprises as they are among the best job generators. Find solutions, not lame excuses.