The country’s transport and highways minister, Nitin Gadkari told reporters today, “We won’t allow driverless cars in India. I am very clear on this.”

The statement wasn’t a reflection of safety concerns. Rather, the minister’s rejection of self-driving vehicles is about the jobs they would take away from drivers in the country. “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,” said Gadkari. He went on to say 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.