Indian road rules broadly operate within the domain of karma where you do your best and leave the results to your insurance company. Here is a funny, and sadly true account by Coen Jukens on driving in India.
The hints are as follows:
Do we drive on the left or right of the road? The answer is “both”. Basically you start on the left of the road, unless it is occupied. In that case, go to the right, unless that is also occupied. Then proceed by occupying the next available gap, as in chess.
- Just trust your instincts, ascertain the direction, and proceed. Adherence to road rules leads to much misery and occasional fatality.
- Most drivers don’t drive, but just aim their vehicles in the intended direction. Don’t you get discouraged or underestimate yourself. Except for a belief in reincarnation, the other drivers are not in any better position.
- Don’t stop at pedestrian crossings just because some fool wants to cross the road. You may do so only if you enjoy being bumped in the back. Pedestrians have been strictly instructed to cross only when traffic is moving slowly or has come to a dead stop because some minister is in town. Still some idiot may try to wade across, but then, let us not talk ill of the dead.
- Blowing your horn is not a sign of protest as in some countries. We horn to express joy, resentment, frustration, romance and bare lust (two brisk blasts) or just to mobilize a dozing cow in the middle of the bazaar.
- Keep informative books in the glove compartment. You may read them during traffic jams, while awaiting the chief minister’s motorcade, or waiting for the rain waters to recede when over-ground traffic meets underground drainage.
- Night driving on Indian roads can be an exhilarating experience (for those with the mental makeup of Genghis Khan). In a way, it is like playing Russian roulette, because you do not know who amongst the drivers is loaded. What looks like premature dawn on the horizon turns out to be a truck attempting a speed record. On encountering it, just pull partly into the field adjoining the road until the phenomenon passes. Our roads do not have shoulders, but occasional boulders. Do not blink your lights expecting reciprocation. The only dim thing in the truck is the driver and the peg of illicit arrack he has had at the last stop; his total cerebral functions add up to little more than a naught. Truck drivers are the James Bonds of India and are licensed to kill. Often you may encounter a single powerful beam of light about six feet above the ground. This is not a super motorbike, but a truck approaching you with a single light on, usually the left one. It could be the right one, but never get too close to investigate. You may prove your point posthumously. Of course, all this occurs at night, on the trunk roads.
During the daytime, trucks are more visible, except that the drivers will never show any signal. (And you must watch for the absent signals; they are a greater threat.) Only, you will often observe that the cleaner that sits next to the driver will project his hand and wave hysterically. This is definitely not to be construed as a signal for a left turn. The waving is just an expression of physical relief on a hot day.
Occasionally you might see what looks like an UFO with blinking colored lights and weird sounds emanating from within. This is an illuminated bus, full of happy pilgrims singing bhajans. These pilgrim buses go at breakneck speed, seeking contact with the Almighty, often meeting with success.
Unique to Indian traffic:
Auto Rickshaw (Baby Taxi)
The result of a collision between a rickshaw and an automobile, this three-wheeled vehicle works on an external combustion engine that runs on a mixture of kerosene oil and creosote. This triangular vehicle carries iron rods, gas cylinders or passengers three times its weight and dimension, at an unspecified fare.
After careful geometric calculations, children are folded and packed into these auto rickshaws until some children in the periphery are not in contact with the vehicle at all. Then their school bags are pushed into the microscopic gaps all round so those minor collisions with other vehicles on the road cause no permanent damage. Of course, the peripheral children are charged half the fare and also learn Newton’s laws of motion en route to school. Auto-rickshaw drivers follow the road rules depicted in the film Ben Hur and are licensed to irritate.
Mopeds
The moped looks like an oil tin on wheels and makes noise like an electric shaver. It runs 30 miles on a teaspoon of petrol and travels at break-bottom speed. As the sides of the road are too rough for a ride, the moped drivers tend to drive in the middle of the road; they would rather drive under heavier vehicles instead of around them and are often “mopped” off the tarmac.
Leaning Tower of Passes
Most bus passengers are given free passes and during rush hours, there is absolute mayhem (hell). There are passengers hanging off other passengers, who in turn hang off the railings and the overloaded bus leans dangerously, defying laws of gravity but obeying laws of surface tension. As drivers get paid for overload (so many Rupees per kg of passenger), no questions are ever asked. Steer clear of these buses by a width of three passengers.
One-way Street
These boards are put up by traffic people to add jest in their otherwise drab lives. Don’t stick to the literal meaning and proceed in one direction. In metaphysical terms, it means that you cannot proceed in two directions at once. So drive as you like, in reverse throughout, if you are the fussy type.
Lest I sound hypercritical, I must add a positive point also.
Rash and fast driving in residential areas has been prevented by providing a “speed breaker”; two for each house. This mound, incidentally, covers the water and drainage pipes for that residence
and is left un-tarred for easy identification by the corporation authorities, should they want to recover the pipe for year-end accounting.
If, after all this, you still want to drive in India, have your lessons between 8 pm and 11 am – when the police have gone home. The citizen is then free to enjoy the ‘FREEDOM OF SPEED’ enshrined in our constitution.
Having said all this, isn’t it true that the accident rate and related deaths are less in India compared to US or other countries ?
This is hilarious!
I live in India and this is absolutely true. I go onto the road every morning and it appears to be a ‘jump the hurdle’ game to me.
On our roads, value of life seems to be negligible.
And my take on this after a recent visit:
Close your eyes and picture this. A shopping mall, standard kind of stuff found anywhere in the (un)civilized world, a long row of brightly lit storefronts, a mosaic of commerce, the establishments selling flashy clothes, computer games, flat screen TV’s and phone cards, CD’s, videos, barrows with candy, sunglasses and jewelery, icecreams and fast food and more candy. The usual evening crowd, milling around, wandering back and forth across the mall dividing the shops, buying fast food, generally hanging out for the evening. Its pretty crowded there. A mall. Not designed for vehicle traffic. So far, so good. Got that picture? Shops, population density, ambience generally?
It’s early evening, just getting dark. The storefronts are brightly lit. Its dark overhead. Maybe we’ve had a power failure in the building. Just a narrow alley of shopfronts, bright lights blazing away, and darkness above. People. Shops. The usual stuff.
Now lets add some livestock. Start with cows. Yup, cows. A lot of cows. Dogs. Them too, lots of dogs. All mongrels. Indeterminate breed. The occasional goat and pig. So we have a shopping mall with domesticated livestock. And a few water buffalo as well. In this part of the world they count as domesticated livestock.
For some reason there are bicycles here as well. Lots of people on bicycles. Not just your typical mountain bike, in fact none of those. Three wheelers. The sort of things that you see old hippies making a living carrying peope sightseeing. A mall with bicycles and cows.
But what are these people doing? All the usual stuff, shopping, hanging out, eating takeaways. And at the edge of the road, there are some sqatting down going potty. We’re not talking children here. Grownups. Right there on the mall. Then you notice that both
sides of the mall in front of the shops are completely strewn with garbage. Old candy wrappers and discarded CD’s. Mounds of unidentified trash.
It’s raining. This is an open air mall. And the mall itsself is just a bit muddy. OK, it’s very muddy, with deep potholes right in the middle of the mall, filled with muddy brown water. Trash everywhere. People defecating in front of the shops. We are about halfway there, focus on that mental image. A muddy, trashed shopping mall.
Now imagine driving down the middle of the mall at about 50mph. You have to toot your horn furiously to get the cows and people just to acknowledge your existence, let alone move out of the way.
But you aren’t the only one driving at high speed up and down the mall. There are several other trucks and motorcycles and passenger cars as well. Since it’s nighttime, then common sense dictates the use
of headlights as well as the horn. There are several philosophies here.
(1) Leave your lights off entirely to save battery power.
(2) Leave your lights permenantly on high beam to make sure everyone sees you coming.
(3) The best of both worlds. Leave your lights off until you see someone coming, then blind them with highbeams.
Of course any of these approaches in isolation would be quite successful. If noone used lights, then night vision would adapt and you would see oncoming traffic. If everyone used lights, then you would at least be aware that there was oncoming traffic.
But in combination, especially combined with strategy (3), the result is fatal. The only redeeming feature is the horn, which if used regularly and with great enthusiasm, can more than make up for the lack of visual acuity. The pedestrians have learned to move out of the way at the sound of the horn.
And that my friends, about sums up night driving through Indian villages.
This is so true, lol!
the traffic-related death rate rate in india is actually one of the highest in the world, taken per vehicle in operation
Your question:
“Having said all this, isn’t it true that the accident rate and related deaths are less in India compared to US or other countries ?”
ANSWER:
No it is not true, to answer your question about number of deaths on the road, we in India proudly excel in this too. Thanks to IPS babus (in-competent and bureaucrats) and non-existence of safety and traffic engineering in this country. Do you know of any police officer who himself/herself drives his or her own car to experience the chaos on the street? Often they even have an escort service for his/her highnesses motorcade to drive through streets. Or to that effect, can you imagine even an ordinary traffic policeman knows how to drive a car? Did you know that car drivers earn more than a traffic policeman
per month here in India. Not just the highways, even the new flyovers (so called) are a joke, when comes to safety designs and quality of construction. Yet, considering the cost of construction materials in India, money spent for building these no less than what other so called advance countries spend. Oh, did I say “advance countries”, you mean India is still backwards – what a shame! or is it a disgrace?
Please read on……..
Search:
India’s roads now officially deadliest in the world
Sat, Oct 11 02:35 PM
London, Oct 11 (ANI): With 130,000 deaths last year, India tops in the number of people killed in road accidents, surpassing China’s 90,000. And, most of these deaths occurred due to bad road designs and lack of proper traffic management systems to separate different streams of traffic, says a report in The Guardian.
The Geneva-based International Road Federation estimates that India already accounts for about 10 percent of the million-plus fatal accidents in the world each year.
This has prompted a government review into traffic safety, which, until now, has been best summed up by local drivers as “good horns, good brakes, good luck”, adds the report.
The Government is also considering a range of new measures such as making air bags and anti-braking systems mandatory in all cars. Lorries may also be fitted with speed breakers in a bid to bring down fatalities.
Motor experts say that new laws will have little effect in India, where seat belts are rarely worn and where no one can anticipate with any certainty the behaviour of the average road user. “You need laws and you need to implement and enforce them. That is the tricky bit in India. Sure, make cars have seat belts, but can you make people wear them? That’s the bit we have to answer,” the paper quoted motoring writer Murad Ali Baig as saying.
Rohit Baluja of Delhi’s Institute of Road Traffic Education said: “The real issue is not car design but road design. About 85 percent of all deaths on the roads are pedestrians and cyclists, not drivers. We do not design traffic management systems to separate different streams of traffic. In America this began in 1932.”
Baluja called for “proper regulation of driver training and licensing” to prevent members of the public buying licences through bribes. The lack of knowledge about road basics is illustrated by the fact that there are 110m traffic violations a day in Delhi alone, he added.
i can drive in India, in fact I have driven in India (Delhi to be precise) but then I am from Pakistan and we are almost like that (minus cows on the roads)
electric mopeds…
Bravo. It is about time someone delved into this….
Nice article! My secret to driving in Delhi was:
Just take care of the 1ft by 1 ft around your car all the way and the rest of the world takes care of itself!
If you try and be ambitious then you start chipping off on your own vehicle!
Cheers,
Desh
Drishtikone.com
hahhaaha… yes this does happen!!
and baby taxi (rickshaw)!! n tin on wheels (moped)!! hahahahaa!! u r hilarious man!!
i landed up here cuz i was searchin for more crazy traffic stuff in india after reading another dude’s blog on some of the craziest traffic rules in India at http://suvadventure.blogspot.com/2008/10/craziest-traffic-rule-in-india.html !!
really crazy rules man!! i didnt even know bout it but i drive on th roads!! th police can catch us for all wierd stuff man!!
keep it up!!
Hi Guys,
Here is a website http://www.driveme.in you wouldn’t want to miss out.
It gives you the real experience of driving through the streets of Pune city in India. You would be able to experience and enjoy the streets… over-speeding, blocking, brakedown, jumping, crossing, cutting, and all sorts of surprises.
Don’t miss out!
Sheer nonsense….it is not that ridiculous…
I live in India…and I think that a newcomer can get accustomed to the driving in a few days time….
child’s play.
Never had the priviledge to drive in India and going by the above comments I never want to. What about Truck Driving and training. Do you need to pass a test?
actaually no … Just bribe ur way thru a licensing authority and you get the license to kill .. 🙂
Still pleased that we have clear rules to follow here in the UK. This just has to make life easier and safer.
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