India on Four Wheels - Season 1

Justin Rowlatt and Anita Rani embark on an epic road trip around India, navigating chaotic cities and rural bywaters to discover how a booming car industry is helping to fuel the country's massive economic growth. Setting off from Delhi in opposite directions, they have three weeks to reach Chennai in the south, where they will meet up at the centre of India's car industry, dubbed the Detroit of Asia.

For her trip Anita is driving a spanking new Indian made 4x4 across some of the country's thousands of miles of new motorways to discover a modern India unrecognisable from 20 years ago. Justin is heading east in a very different vehicle - a clapped out Hindustan Ambassador, the iconic symbol of an older India. On the way he investigates the darker side of this economic revolution - how pollution is choking the cities and how hundreds of millions of people are still locked in poverty, seeming cut off from the huge wealth being generated.

Two journeys full of colour and chaos, glamour and grime, illustrating what some people think is the birth of a new super power.

Justin Rowlatt and Anita Rani embark on an epic road trip around India to discover how a booming car industry is helping to fuel the country's massive economic growth.

Nearly two weeks into her journey in an Indian-made Mahindra 4x4, Anita has reached Mumbai, India's financial hub, and home to billionaires and Bollywood stars, as well as one of the world's biggest slums. As she continues on her discovery of modern India, Anita encounters some of the fastest and most dangerous roads in the country, Bangalore's night-life, and a rally champ who is on a personal mission to make India's drivers better and safer.

Meanwhile, Justin is nurturing his rusty Hindustan Ambassador along some far more bumpy roads as he meets rural farmers who are getting their first taste of motoring, sees the potential effects of fossil fuel use on one of the world's most precious and delicate ecosystems, and meets an ancient tribe, locked into a battle with industry over an aluminium-rich, sacred mountain.

The road-weary pair aim to meet up in the mega-port of Chennai to complete their journeys - if the cars make it that far.