The curtain comes down on people's car Maruti

It has been 26 years since the original people's car rolled out on the streets of Delhi. On December 14, 1983, then prime minister Indira Gandhi handed over the keys of the first Maruti 800 to Harpal Singh, a flight operations officer in the Indian Airlines. Bigger and faster cars have since zoomed past the Maruti 800, but its charms have remained undiminished. Be it mileage, reliability, an extensive service network or its high resale value, the Maruti 800 has been the popular choice for years. And just as Singh is remembered as the first owner, so would be 36-year-old Abbas Ahmed. On Wednesday, he became the last owner of the car in the Capital. A dealer in steel cupboards, Ahmed desperately wanted a Maruti 800 - not to be a part of history, he mentioned. He had moved the bank seeking a loan to buy the car but when he realised that it will take time and that the car would not be available from Thursday, he borrowed money from friends and relatives and bought the car on Wednesday evening. Ahmed bought the standard model of the car which comes without air-conditioning. "In the morning I had no idea that the car won't be available in the market from tomorrow. But when I came to know that the loan would take a few days to be sanctioned by which time I would lose the opportunity to buy the car, I decided to buy the car today itself," said Ahmed. His reason for buying the car was no different from the thousands of owners who found the car - priced at Rs 2.06 lakh (ex- showroom on Wednesday) - to be within their budget. Thursday onwards, 13 cities, including the NCR, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and Bangalore, will switch over to Bharat Stage-IV emission norms. The company chose not to upgrade Maruti 800 to the new norms and has instead decided to phase out the car in the metropolitan cities. In the rest of the country, the car will be available for a while longer before they adopt BS-III norms from October. As the curtains come down on the earliest exponent of the small car segment, it also brings to end an era where a Maruti 800 meant more than just a car. It was a friend, as middle-class India found out over two decades. Talking about the Maruti 800, car designer Dilip Chhabria said, "The Maruti 800 revolutionised the car market in the country. However, the sales had come down in the recent years and a phase-out was imminent. The introduction of BS-IV in metropolitan cities only sped up the process of phasing out. There's a lot of sentiment attached to the car which succeeded and gave the car market a new direction in the country." Shaheed, who works as an adviser at a car showroom, has been associated with Maruti since 1984. Having joined the company a year after the car was launched, Shaheed has witnessed its journey through the years. "Maruti has stopped making cars like the Zen but there's still a huge demand for these cars in the market. The same would be the case for the Maruti 800. Any Maruti 800 car would fetch a high resale value," Shaheed said. Now 82, Singh, the car's first owner doesn't remember much about the historic occasion. But his wife Gursharanbir Kaur said, "Our car never failed us. We still own the car and it has never shut down on the road. We bought this car for Rs 54,000 and it was the best investment we made."