29 Aug 2011: Freedom from Fuel Hikes

Freedom - what a word it is and how each one of us are fond to be saying "I have Freedom". And the fight for freedom is not a new thing to all of us. Every time we want to be free from something or the other at various walks of our life. If you look at our forefathers, they fought the English to obtain free India. And now, with Anna Hazare's initiation almost all of us are willing to fight to make free India to be freed from the corruption. So in one way or the other, whether it is yesterday, today or tomorrow, we look forward to Freedom from something or the other.

So how is that we can get freedom from the fuel hikes which have rocketed like anything in few years? The fuel hikes which has become a constant daily news for each one of us. As you tear away a date from your daily calendar you should be dreading to hear the hike in fuel prices. Just go and check with the women - nowadays they are not even worried that they are older by a day but much more worried to see a day pass-by, just frightened to hear the news of fuel price hike.

The reasons that are provided for the fuel price hike are more of political side and I let that to the people who deal well with it - news channels. What ever be the reason our concern is that every month we need to allocate some extra amount towards fuel budget from that of the previous month. This is the hard reality that all of us are facing.

So, what could we do to overcome this fuel hike? One option for the 4 wheelers is that they can move to Diesel vehicles if they are on Petrol now. Still the initial investment for the Diesel vehicle is substantial and moving from the one you have already is not that easy either in terms of the amount you might lose on re-selling. In spite of all these things, if you move out to a Diesel vehicle, with the current trend Diesel will soon catch up the petrol's price in the near future. Which fuel should we move from Diesel to?? Kerosene or what??? Ideally cant beat the fuel hike.

Atleast for 4 wheelers they have an option to bring down the monthly expense by switching to Diesel. What about the 2 wheelers? Should they opt for diesel engine? (auto companies, its actually an idea for you guys to work on the diesel engine for 2 wheelers like how Enfiled had years ago... and dont worry I wont ask you for more % :)) So till the time they have an option they will have to stick with this only. No overcoming the fuel hike in this case too.

We have buses, lorries, tempo travellers that run on diesel. So can we go for any of these for our daily ride or what? :)) Atleast I wont and cant. Or we should plan for a ride in a tonga or bullock cart or rickshaw or by walking which we were doing ages before. But are these feasible?

One solution that I could think of is that we could still move to diesel vehicles. Hey guys.. wait dont rush to beat me blue. Wait a minute and listen to what exactly I wanted to tell you all. I meant to use the public vehicles - yeah.. you got it... buses. By using the bus for our daily commution we could actually beat the fuel hike. How??

Assume all of us use the buses for commuting to any place we plan to go. This way the number of vehicles that come on road becomes lesser. This means the fuel consumption per day becomes lesser. The roads are freed by the excessive vechicles. This means reaching the destination would be close to the actual timing (to those who wonder what actual timing is: for a 10 km distance how long it should take ideally? 15 to 20 minutes right? But can you say that you can reach the place in that time with the always growing vehicle population? sometime it could take an hour too). This means the demand will be less and over a period of time the government might think of bringing the price down. I know they wont show that urgency in bringing down the price as they show while increasing it, still hope is what life is and lets atleast hope for that to happen :) Above all we could have made the environment smell a little greener. For this the government has to come up with more buses that are better to commute. Hike in fuel cost is fueling the hike of other necessary things for day to day life and it is time that government should really look into this issue seriously.

Having proposed this, I know this is not an easy thing to implement with all of us used to plan our travel based on our priorities. But with such things it is very difficult to get freedom from fuel hikes. We would grudge about the hikes and allocate some extra money and proceed. This is the hard reality we have to face today and to be frank really struggling for the freedom from fuel hikes. Can we expect a Anna Hazare for fuel hike issues to be born? Time will have to tell :)

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