Bajaj announces end of the road for its scooters

Bajaj Auto Ltd, India's second-biggest two-wheeler maker and a company once almost synonymous with scooters in India, will stop producing scooters altogether by March to focus on motorcycles, the company says.

Bajaj will stop producing its hardly-selling Kristal scooters by the end of the current fiscal year, managing director Rajeev Bajaj told newspersons in New Delhi, yesterday.

Bajaj Auto, which was once synonymous with scooters, had halted production of the Chetak and Super models, on which two generations of Indians rode, some years ago. In the pre-liberalisation days, the waiting period for allotment of a Bajaj scooter stretched to years, with government-mandated curbs on production.

The days are not long past when 'Hamara Bajaj' – as the popular advertising jingle called it – was a prized family possession. The company was then the world's biggest scooter maker, selling over 1,00,000 units a month.

But with a new generation of economical and high-performance motorcycles having almost elbowed the stodgy Bajaj scooter out of the market, Rajeev Bajaj said the company will now concentrate on motorcycles, with the aim of emerging as the world's biggest bike-maker ahead of Honda. ''We have an opportunity to shoot for something... to be the largest motorcycle maker in the world,'' Bajaj said as he announced growth plans for the motorcycle segment.

Bajaj has seen its scooter volumes drop to barely a couple of hundreds per month, as Hero Honda again outsmarted it with its superior Activa scooters. Hero Honda now sells more than 6,00,000 scooters a year.