Just because the "developed" world has already brought us 90% to irreversible damage doesn't mean that we should deny cars to people who couldn't afford them previously. I'm sure that those cars will be sold as EVs as soon as that's feasible. Meanwhile countries that have the money could probably do more to reduce emissions. India's efforts to reduce emissions (i.e. increase them less) look extremely ambitions given their budget.

I'm pretty sure that being brought up to 90%* irreversible damage is actually a perfectly legitimate reason to deny cars to people who couldn't afford them previously.

The value created by access to a car they can afford will advance both India and the world to the next level of health, abundance, and technology. Just as the car and the ICE advanced so many other places of the world from the horse cart. With that I believe will come the education and technology needed to push us past ICEs and further into the future.

Yeah, except that...

(1) when the car and the ICE advanced so many other places of the world, we didn't have alternative technologies. Now we do,

(2) climate change is already underway, with mid-term scenarios ranging from very worrying to catastrophic,

(3) the population densities and city sizes in those places of the world where ICE cars saw a boom in the last century were nowhere near that of India. A car-centric model in cities over 10M population is a disaster,

(4) for this reason the most comparable example would be China, who is experiencing massive pollution problems in cities, and has already reacted with traffic-restricting laws and the rapid construction of metropolitan mass-transit networks and a high-speed rail network.

I get the argument that it's unfair for the West to deny to others what we already experimented in the past, but I really don't think it's in the interest of India (even ignoring global factors like climate change) to become a massively polluting car-centric society. We know better now, the way forward is not to reenact the West's 80s, it's to take advantage of not having made the West's errors to skip that and embrace newer tech and trends directly (just as landlines were skipped in so many countries).

I do, but that's an unreasonable feeling to have (even though I don't drive). We can't willingly prevent other people from accessing stuff (cars but also meat which has similar implications) when we westerners live in such opulence. Yes, I'm all for degrowth.

The efficiency of the free market at work.