How choosing the best car and bike these days is tougher than ever

Siddhartha uses the NDTV Awards jury meet as a barometer to measure just how far the industry has come in the past few years. Credibility. A simple enough word really, but one that can have many definitions – especially for different people. In our industry, that word means reliable, safe, and efficient products for the most part. But for us scribes the word means being honest and fair when assessing those products. The cars and bikes we now get are different from say a decade ago. No car or bike these days is really “bad.” Yup, the industry stopped turning out lemons ages back! Of course, the fact that most products are good makes it that much harder to really spot the crucial differences between them. But the differences do exist, miniscule as they may be! Where am I going with this? Both the things I mentioned have lots to do with our annual awards for the automobile industry – the NDTV Car & Bike Awards. With each passing year, we have endeavoured to improve the awards process itself, and have also strived to ensure that credibility is the differentiator between ours and the rest. There has also been a growing association with the World Car Awards, since I have been a juror there since 2011 – and am now also on the steering committee. Plus, now, with this magazine’s editor not just on our jury two years running, but also now on the World Car Awards jury – we now have 3 WCA jurors on board the NDTV jury too. Unlike the other automobile awards, I have no editorial discretion on deciding any of the segment winners, or bigger awards. And, also unlike the rest, I remain the only NDTV representative amongst 11 jurors – to avoid any bias by having a block vote of sorts. Since last year, we have also decided to make all jury scores public – so there is a transparent declaration of why a particular product won. It was also the 10th edition of our awards, and we went bigger and better than ever before. I was proud and pleased to also have this publication as our magazine partner for the event. And we were back at the Buddh International Circuit – for our product testing, as well as the ceremony itself. This year, we also split up the cars and bikes – and had our jury meets for each on consecutive days rather than on the same day. We also had specific jury members for each of the spaces, which made the discussions and decisions more comprehensive and focussed. We also got more time with all the nominees, and boy did we have a lot of nominees this year! The most ever performance sedans and SUV’s, regular SUV’s, as well as interesting scooters, and bikes with engines above 1,000cc. Yes, the Indian market is changing. The high-end products may not yet count for much in terms of sales volumes, but it’s the nature of the products coming to us – and the strategies of their makers – that has undergone quite a shift. And never is it more apparent to us all than at the awards jury meet! Conducting the awards at the BIC has its share of challenges and obstacles. But all in all, as the dust settles on the entire process, and the juggernaut rests until next year – I can safely say that we did still pull off our biggest and best awards ever. I am proud of our jury, what a superb mix of people – the racers (Karun Chandhok, Aditya Patel), the enthusiasts (Kamlesh Patel, Gul Panag), the experienced industry veterans (Dr. V Sumantran, Sulajja Firodia Motwani), the internationally acclaimed (Dilip Chhabria), and the very seasoned motoring journalists (Dhruv Behl, Jens Meiners, Pablo Chaterji, and yours truly). I couldn’t be happier! And, oh, after reading through my little diatribe on how well we have done things – let me assure you – we still have miles to go. Yes, there are many things that can still be improved. But let me end with the promise that we will continue to do just that – improve. And never lose sight of the word I started it all with – credibility. It takes some guts to call our awards India’s most credible! Now don’t forget to flip through the pages and check out the autoX report on the ceremony, and who the big winners were...