New Delhi Sep 6 (IANS) Union Minister Anant Geete on Thursday said that there is a need to move towards electric mobility due to concerns over environmental damage caused by vehicle emissions.
The Minister for Heavy Industry and Public Sector Enterprises was speaking at the 58th annual convention of the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM).
"We need to transform with time as technology is changing by the day. There is a global concern for environment. Every topic every endeavour... anything we built needs an element of environment friendliness aspect to it " Geete said.
"If the world is moving towards global mobility so should we."
According to Geete an adequate time period is required by the industry to make the transition towards electric mobility.
"... In order to accept the change certain amount of time is a necessity. So the industry must get sufficient time " Geete said.
Besides the minister informed the convention that a new National Automobile Policy is being formulated which will be "customer industry and environment" friendly.
Accordingly he said that industry s concerns over the challenges and problems will be addressed in the new policy.
At the convention NITI Aayog Vice Chairman Rajiv Kumar said the auto sector is facing huge disruption as it moves from IC (Internal Combustion) engines to electric vehicles.
"We should begin to talk more and more on the fact that India can not survive succeed and the world can not afford the personally owned vehicle model of transportation " Kumar said.
"We can not emulate having 700 or 500 cars per 1 000 (people)."
He however insisted that the auto sector must invest more on innovation and R&D (Research and Development).
Kumar informed the convention that the NITI Aayog is finalising the framework for auto industry and is co-ordinating with state governments to form a task force and come out with a paper for future mobility.

--IANS ravi-rv/bg