People of Delhi handed Sheila Dikshit a third straight victory in the capital. Without wasting any time and without losing the good work she was doing, Madam Chief Minister is implementing one more ingenious idea. Allow advertising on Autos and taxis and share revenue. This should bring in 300 crore additional revenues for the next fiscal.
Sheila Dikshit of Delhi, Narendra Modi of Gujarat are definitely one of the finer Chief Ministers India ever had. Why don’t we have a equally dynamic Prime Minister? Well, don’t bother to answer. That is not the discussion I want to drive here anyway.
There is a start-up called CashUrDrive which pays for the fuel for carrying advertisements on your personal car. There are few conditions like the car should travel for 20 odd kilometers a day. This service is available in select cities. People are already earning their fuel expense by lending their valuable real estate. I wanted to do this but this service is not yet available in Bangalore and I don’t travel that much.
This is a good idea for private vehicles. Not all private vehicles will let their car look like a Formula one car. But some would do. That itself is self-regulatory. Extending this for Autos and taxis as a government regulation would be a totally different story.
Allowing taxis and autos for advertising – sure – will earn revenues. We already have buses – the red volvo kind in Bangalore displaying advertisements. And they are generating revenues. But the question is – Is it too much of visual noise? There are billboards, there are smaller advertisement boards on the divider, there are advertisements on the traffic signals too.
Do we need so many advertising platforms for our heavily undisciplined Indian drivers? Indian drivers have an attention span of a 2 year old.
And most importantly isn’t it too much for Indian drivers who have a lot of things to take care of while driving?
There is a chicken and egg kind of a problem here. Advertisers would ask the drivers not to look at the advertisements if it is too much of a visual noise. Drivers would ask the advertisers, why do you need the advertisements if you don’t want us to look at them. Very fair questions on both sides and I don’t have any answers to either.
I am fine with the visual noise but, don’t include Priyanka Chopra or Katrina Kaif. That would be too distracting for me.
What do you think about the visual noise?