Riding in Cars 7.3.09

Driving in India seems to be a talent all by itself. If anyone is anxious or nervous I do not recommend it. But it you’re able to sit back and not worry about things too much, you might even enjoy it a little. The drivers are all incredibly skillful, and you have to be to not get killed on the road.

When I first left the Delhi airport I noticed a sign saying something along the lines of “Please Stay in Your Lanes.” Not realizing how big of a deal that was, I kind of shrugged it off, almost surprised that I had seen it, but not really. But after two days of being driven around, it’s so clear as to why that was there, and even more so how nobody pays any attention to such signs. The lanes are barely suggestions for the drivers, even the middle yellow line is more of a hint of what side you probably want to stay towards when there is lots of oncoming traffic more than legally which side of the road you need to drive on. It’s a game of lots of small cars that simply nudge and honk their way between each other, however they can fit, whenever they have the chance. Whether the other drivers see them or not is not completely an issue, especially because the horns are basically non-stop on the road, making sure they know you’re coming through, so they’d better get over half an inch cause that’s all you need, and then you take it and there are no surprises when you make it through unscathed.

However when I was reading the paper this morning, a couple of things caught my attention about the traffic. The first was an article about the huge daily increase of the number of cars on the road and the heavy traffic that the city deals with on a daily basis. The article centered on a major road that was currently six lanes, under construction to expand to eight, but with the current estimates in 2011 would need to be at 24 lanes to serve the number of cars that will be using it. 24 lanes! From six. Huge. The other article which was really sad, reported a hit and run that killed a woman. She was then repeatedly run over by other drivers on the road that failed to stop so by the time the police found her she was completely unrecognizable. It was fairly graphic talking about how they put her body parts into plastic bags to be sent to the lab to get identified. Pedestrians are constantly just crossing the freeways and highways, whenever they see an opening, whether it was a large one or not. People and bikes are along every single road I’ve been on. And they did not represent a green movement of people not using cars – one of the articles did mention the need for increased public transit – but lack of safety. Some of the signs I saw tonight in Kolkata included “No Worry, No Hurry” and “Take your time, Not your life” to emphasize to drivers to slow down. The signs didn’t seem to be doing much of anything.

So it’s interesting because given the signs I’ve seen, someone thinks there are problems to fix. But how efficiently are they being addressed? Is there real action or simply a few signs? And how much money would it cost to make real improvements on the roads and transportation, and is that money better spent on increasing the nutritional intake of the country’s children, or increasing access to education, or providing better access to medicine? I really don’t know the answers and I’m not going to pretend I do and say what I think the number one obvious answer is … because I don’t think there is just one. And I do know there are lots of people working on all of these issues. I’m here to do what I can in addressing the water situation in West Bengal. I know that a lot of these issues are related, connected by the cores of poverty and power and the legacy of imperialism. I am excited to learn from people here about what they do to improve their own lives around water access and what they think needs to be done to continue improving their country. Real change comes from people, not signs.