India's Transport and Highways minister has told reporters that the government there will not allow driverless cars because of the effect they would have on jobs in the country.Engadget.com quotes Nitin Gadkari as saying, "We won't allow any technology that takes away jobs. In a country where you have unemployment, you can't have a technology that ends up taking people's jobs."The report adds that he continued by saying that while India was indeed short about 22,000 commercial drivers, the government was working on opening a number of training facilities across the country in order to get 5,000 more professional drivers on the road over the next few years.
However, Engadget also says that statements from former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and Google's CEO Sundar Pichai suggested that the country was unlikely to be getting autonomous vehicles anytime soon anyway because of the "haphazard roads and chaotic traffic" in parts of the country which would make it difficult to safely introduce driverless technology onto the roadways.
