By: Avik Chattopadhyay, Auto trade marketing consultant and co-founder of Expereal
The information that the HM Ambassador could also be revived has caught the flowery of many round me. The media has been writing about it. There are posts on social media platforms about the identical. Scions of the Birla household are sharing posts. Automotive circles are discussing the professionals and cons of the rebirth of certainly one of India’s most ‘loved’ automobiles!
I for one am not moved in any respect. Just just like the Amby used to hardly transfer. Words like love, favorite, legacy, heritage et al are hole and completely misplaced. The Ambassador was one of many solely three automobiles a median Indian may purchase for a superb 4 many years since we despatched the British packing. There was no choice however to ‘love’ it. It was India’s favorite automotive as the opposite two automotive makers didn’t have sufficient manufacturing capability. We purchased it out of compulsion, not out of selection. We grew up seeing the Amby on the roads as there have been hardly another choices. Growing up with a model doesn’t essentially imply that the experiences had been positively memorable.
About phrases like legacy and heritage assigned to it, the much less mentioned the higher. The Ambassador was a Nineteen Fifties know-how being dished out to helpless clients until the 2010s. Whoever has visited the Uttarpara would recount tales of making use of cottage trade expertise to automotive making. The Birlas had determined early on that was a cow that needed to be milked eternally. There had been hardly any severe investments made in fashionable engineering and manufacturing.
As a younger administration government in 1992 I keep in mind how HM virtually stalled the introduction of the entrance seat belt because the Amby’s B-pillars weren’t robust sufficient to take the structural stress. As there was nothing up to date within the car, the corporate and a few pliant media began spinning tales of the Ambassador’s legacy in India.
The Ambassador is symbolic of all that was mistaken with India within the Sixties and 70s. It was a manifestation of the “licence raj” with just a few enterprise homes taking advantage of authorities insurance policies and loopholes in shelling out sub-standard merchandise to a newly rising middle-class. Protectionism was used to not promote home innovation and industriousness however to protect deliberate inefficiency and cartelisation. Under the garb of socialism among the most blatant ills of capitalist greed had been inspired.
There had been public enterprises like HMT which produced qualitatively far superior merchandise and will have simply been used to fabricate cars. Till 2014, when the Amby was lastly buried, it was a shameful image of the rising financial would possibly that was India. Thankfully with the approaching of Maruti, Tata, Mahindra, Daewoo, Hyundai and Honda, the car had misplaced full relevance and even the bureaucrats refused to journey in it anymore. The Ambassador belongs to a museum and brings again recollections to Indians similar to a Trabant does to Germans. It deserves a spot and point out within the annals of historical past similar to the English East India Company does. It doesn’t have anywhere in the way forward for the Indian car trade.
Source: www.financialexpress.com”