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India is teeming with cars; skilled drivers still scarce
2008-05-11
A few weeks ago, the traditional Indian joint family household of Vineet Sharma, a fertilizer industry consultant, achieved a long deferred dream. Having ferried themselves on scooters all these years, the Sharmas bought a brand-new, silver-gray hatchback known as the Tata Indica. Never mind that none of the six adult members of the household knew how to drive. No sooner had the car arrived than Sharma, 34, took it for a spin and knocked over a friend. His brother slammed into a motorcyclist, injuring no one but damaging the bumper. The brother was so scared that he no longer gets behind the wheel, except Sundays when roads are empty.Even as Tata Motors unveiled the world's cheapest car, anybody negotiating traffic here can see many hurdles still hinder the new Indian romance with the road.
Indians are rushing headlong to get behind the wheel, as incomes rise, car loans proliferate, and the auto industry churns out low-cost cars to nudge them off their motorcycles. They bought 1.5 million cars last year. By some estimates India is expected to soar past China this year as the fastest-growing car market.Car mania also spawned a new industry in driver-training classes. Mornings, one can see student drivers crawling along the roads and veterans honking madly behind them. Sharma recently enrolled in a weeklong driving course and dived headlong into the madness of the morning commute in a beat-up Maruti 800. Its odometer had long ago stopped working, and it carried on its roof a sign for the driving school, accompanied, improbably, by the smiling face of the animated movie character Shrek.
Sharma wasn't going very fast and said he was very nervous. Amid a cacophony of horns on the Ring Road here, a blood-red sport-utility vehicle wove between cars, passing Sharma within a razor's edge on the right. A school bus snuggled close up on his left. No one seemed to care about traffic lanes. Cars bounced in and out of crater-sized potholes.Sharing the roads with Sharma was a bicyclist with three cooking-gas cylinders strapped to the back of his bike, a pushcart vendor plying guavas, a cycle rickshaw loaded with a photocopy machine (rickshaws being the preferred mode of delivery for modern appliances). There were also a great many pedestrians, either leaping into traffic in the absence of crosswalks or marching in thick rows on the sides of the road in the absence of sidewalks. At one point, a car careered down the wrong side of the road. Then a three-wheeled scooter-rickshaw came at Sharma, only to duck swiftly down a side street. At least this morning there was no elephant chewing bamboo in the fast lane, as there sometimes is.
Dinner-party chatter here is usually rife with theories on road management. It is said that Indians drive as though they are still on two wheels, or that snaking in and out of lanes is the only way so many cars can survive on narrow, ill-kept roads. Sharma's theory was simpler: "We have a knack for breaking laws," he muttered. The city's top police official in charge of traffic shared that sentiment. He was vexed by all this talk of new low-cost cars. "My concern is not with cars. My concern is with drivers," said Suvashish Choudhary, the deputy commissioner of police.When Choudhary was reminded of the remarkable fact that the sharp rise in the number of cars in New Delhi had not been accompanied by a sharp rise in traffic accidents, he scoffed, and went on to list his grievances: no one gives way, everyone jostles to be the first to move when the traffic light turns green and a lack of crosswalks prompts pedestrians to frequently jump out into traffic. He called it "a lack of driving culture."
Half of all fatal road accident victims are pedestrians, according to the police. Every now and then, a homeless person sleeping on the street is run over. Last week, a speeding car banged into a policeman standing at a traffic checkpoint and didn't bother to stop; the officer was critically injured. "Everyone knows a bit of driving," Sharma observed. "The problem is following the rules. Everyone is in a hurry."New Delhi issued more than 300,000 drivers' licenses last year, which could be seen as either a feat of bureaucratic efficiency or Indian ingenuity. At one city licensing office, the test, which took about a minute, consisted of turning on the ignition and driving in a wide circle. A professional chauffeur named Ramfali said he had obtained a license even though he cannot read. Sharma paid about $40, or five times the official fee, to an independent broker who fetched him a license in half an hour.
As for Sharma, by the end of his first class, he had decided that four wheels, while desirable, were not always practical. His scooter, he pointed out, was cheaper and faster.
Article written by Somini Sengupta
The New York Times
Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company
