Every journal and media is naming the men, women, soldiers and thinkers of the century, why not name the outstanding movers and shakers of the auto industry because nobody can move and shake as much as cars, bikes and their makers and users.

The 5 star award of the car of the century goes to the Maruti 800 that liberated car owners from the big, noisy, polluting and unreliable cars upto 1983 and enabled women the freedom to drive with ease and confidence. The Hindustan Ambassador, that has been around forever and took the car to the masses. The dunce cap goes to the Standard 2000, which quickly became known as the stranded 2000.

The 4 star award for carmaker of the century goes to Maruti that accounted for nearly 70% of all cars ever made in India. The runner up who won the carmaker of the year award was Hyundai who in their very first year became India's 2nd largest carmaker selling 58,632 Santros and 1,689 Accent cars. Hyundai also get the award for setting up India's most complete car plant in less than 2 years capable of 85% local content. The dunce cap goes to Premier Automobiles who fell off the map.

The star cars of 1999 were the aggressively priced Santro, Indica and Matiz that joined the Zen and Uno to trigger a huge growth of the mid segment and account for most of the growth of the car segment. Similar launches of bigger cars like the Siena, Accent, Ikon, Baleno and Corsa at the end of 1999 might spur a similar growth among the prestige cars and make them the stars of 2000.

The 3 star award for courage goes to Telco for daring to take on the world's top auto companies with the Indian designed and built Indica that promised to provide the space of an Ambassador with the fuel consumption and cost of a Maruti.

The 5 star award among 2-wheelers goes to Hero Honda whose sales soared 34 % to 669,000 units in 1999 to command 43% of 1999 motorcycle sales. It also gets the dunce cap for it's `Street' model because it did not appreciate that, to Indian tastes, this world leading motorcycle looked like a lowly moped.

The 1999 Industry award for the star of India's auto sector goes to passenger cars that leaped ahead 32% of the previous years sales to reach 5,60,000.They were closely followed by trucks and busses that also grew 32% to 104,000 units. In third place were motorcycles that grew 26% with 16,37,000 sales.

At the end of the millennium, India will have a population of roughly 30 million 2-wheelers, 7 million cars and about 4 million trucks and busses. While the growth of vehicles has been impressive the same cannot be said about India's roads so the Government of India at the centre, states and local levels gets the dunce cap of the being the spoilsport of the century.

A special award for misdescription goes to India's highways because India actually has no highways at all but only slightly wider roads connecting towns and mainly carry inter town traffic. Real highways are designed for fast and economical long distance traffic and bypass the towns.

The award for invisibility goes to the highway police that do not exist in India with the result that overloaded, undermaintained, badly driven vehicles with badly trained drivers clog the roads with unregulated noise, pollution and confusion as they kill or maim thousands every month.

The blind man's award goes to surviving relics of a tribe of Socialist thinkers who considered motorised vehicles as toys of the elite and fit subjects for punishing taxation. They could not understand that automobiles were one of the major engines of economic and employment growth that, more than anything else, drove America, Germany, Japan and Korea to prosperity. But then these were all Capitalist countries that did not believe in the Socialist paradise.

The spiritual award goes to the Indian bus driver who, with or without spirits, puts the fear of God into more people than all the priests and sages of all the religions put together.

The 10 star award for long suffering patience goes to the Indian citizen who did not protest about bad cars, busses, roads and road management. They were not considered politically important but a time is coming when it will be realised that 40 million adult motorists and their passengers represent a far larger vote bank than India's 18 million industrial workers or 25 million Government employees. Things will, therefore, become worse before the Government wakes up to address their needs.