Motorworld (16 page)

This means that, every twelve months, 60,000 people die on the Indian roads and if you ask about serious injuries, officialdom just shrugs, a despairing look on its face.

Informed sources reckon that upwards of a quarter of a million people are hospitalised and broken by car crashes every year in India. That’s the population of a big British town.

And the statistics keep on coming. In Bombay, a city which has more dollar-millionaires than Los Angeles or New York, every single family has been affected in some way by a car crash. Nationwide, one car in five will, at some stage in its life, be involved in a fatal accident.

We may scoff at the Indian’s inability to get from A to B without killing someone but, really, it isn’t funny.

And despite what you might think, the driving test is not really to blame because most people don’t bother taking it.

What you do if you want a permit is send a few rupees to a driving agency in another state, simply asking for one. And by return of post, you’ll get it.

One girl that we spoke to decided to actually take the test and then found herself sharing her exam with six other hopefuls. Everyone else, including the examiner, piled into one car and she was asked to drive her little hatchback on her own. After a couple of hundred yards, the two-car convoy stopped and everyone passed, even though five of them had only been passengers and she’d been on her own.

With this sort of background, you can be assured that almost no one on the street has any form of training. But more worrying still, they don’t follow any rules.

The trouble is that if you are stopped by a policeman, which almost never happens, you only need furnish his outstretched paw with the equivalent of £2 and nothing more will be said. The motoring courts in India’s cities are as packed as the Yukon.

Take insurance, for example. To drive without it in Europe is a serious offence which will result in a possible jail term. Throughout the Continent, high streets are full of insurance brokers and every newspaper carries advertisements for bargains galore.

But none is quite so cheap as the system in India. You just don’t buy it.

But even a complete lack of discipline or training doesn’t account for what is a massacre. I mean, there are other countries in the world with a similar background of corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency, and they don’t get through 164 people every day.

What sets India apart is religion. Being mindful of Salman Rushdie’s fate, and not wanting to criticise
Hinduism, I feel duty-bound to report that it doesn’t fit very well with motoring. These are pieces from two different jigsaws.

It seems that Hindus have a fatalistic approach to life, believing that everything has been organised in advance and that there is absolutely nothing they can do to shape their own destiny. Que serà serà and fair enough.

We spoke to one ordinary businessman who was by no means a zealot and he explained, calmly, that he would trust his God more than mechanical safety. Indeed, he told of a time when his brakes had failed just a few miles into a cross-country journey, adding, ‘I said a prayer and carried on; 250 km without brakes, but it was OK because it was not my day to die.’

But what about the Indian habit of pulling out to overtake on a blind bend or just before the brow of a hill, something that they all do? ‘Well,’ said our man, ‘if it’s your day to die, boom, you go.’ And what about the person you hit? ‘Well it was obviously his day to go too.’

Coupled to this fatalistic approach is a belief in reincarnation which removes all fear of death. Why worry about it, when you know you’ll be back as a bumblebee or a sheep some time later? That’s not intended as criticism – it’s a fact.

But, unfortunately, the belief that you don’t control the car and that if you die, it’s no big deal, does create problems. About 164 problems every day actually.

I drove from Bombay to Pune and simply could not believe what my eyes were seeing.

The roadside was littered with broken and smashed
trucks, and I’m not using hyperbole here. When I say littered, I mean, littered. Every few hundred yards, there’d be another gaily painted
circa
-1950s lorry upside down in the ditch.

Every tree along the entire route showed signs of battle damage, of having been in a collision with some kind of motor vehicle.

In one case, the lorry in question was still wrapped round the trunk. The whole passenger side of the cab was gone but mercifully no one had been sitting there at the moment of impact. I know this because the driver told me. He’d been sitting by the wreckage for four days, waiting for help.

‘Have you got any food?’ I asked. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘I brought plenty for when I crashed.’ ‘When’, you’ll note. Not ‘if’.

Crashing on this main highway is a certainty, for many reasons.

First, huge potholes big enough to swallow a train, never mind my Mahindra Jeep, are thoughtfully marked out by a ring of boulders of exactly the right size to either break your steering or launch you into the pit.

They use boulders in India to mark out all the hazards. When your truck breaks down in the middle of the road, which it will, the first thing you do is surround it with boulders. The boulder is India’s warning triangle though, frankly, it doesn’t work.

You come round a corner, see the stranded lorry and you are usually still working out which side to pass when you hit the huge stone. Things get even worse at
night because no self-respecting Indian ever uses his lights. Who needs them when you have divine guidance.

You drive along blind and if, by some miracle, you see the lorry-sized obstacle, you daren’t ease on to the wrong side of the road to pass because there’s no way of knowing if anything’s there. You’ll still be braking hard, and deciding what to do, when the boulder breaks your steering joints.

There are cows, too. Elsewhere in the democratic world, farmyard animals graze in fields, prevented from getting on to the roads with fences which are often electrified. But not in India. Cows there have obviously developed a fondness for small pieces of gravel because round every bend, your way will be blocked with a quarter-ton of meat, muscle and horn. One day, cows will learn to surround themselves with boulders, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Children are equally daft. There are no pelican crossings with handy beepers for the deaf, no purpose-built speed bumps near the school. And no Green Cross Code either. When a child wants to get from one side of the road to the other, he simply does it, without warning.

There are no speed limits in India but I was so wary of all the various hazards that I tended to drive around at a pace which was measurable in yards per year. You would have needed a theodolite and three satellites to ascertain that I was making any progress at all sometimes.

I was a glacier with wheels and this was only partly to do with the ever-present risk of mad children, madder cows and the boulders. It was mostly to do with my Jeep.

This may have been based on the American beach-party
special but it’s Indian-made and Indian-developed. Were it not for the Russian version I drove in Vietnam, I’d have to say it was the worst car in the world.

The only smooth things about it were the tyres. Its steering was supertanker precise and heavier than a photocopier. It braked like a rhino, sounded like a bulldozer in an aviary and nothing electrical worked… except the horn.

This, said my guide, Hormazd, was a good thing because in India the horn is ‘your air bag, your side-impact bars, your safety belt and your anti-lock brakes, all rolled into one little button. You’d better use it liberally.’

He also told me that for sheer lunacy, Indian driving takes the cake and that if I tried to drive like I did in Britain, I wouldn’t really get anywhere.

Well hey, I wasn’t driving like I do in Britain, and I still wasn’t really getting anywhere.

Continental drift was faster than me that day. And so were the buses. But when they came up behind, they didn’t sit there, waiting for a gap in the traffic; they simply pulled onto the wrong side of the road and went for it, irrespective of what was coming.

It didn’t matter if we were 50 yards from a blind bend, or just about to crest a hill, or even if there was a car quite obviously coming the other way; they just went right ahead and tried to overtake.

And that’s not the end of the story because if, while the bus was halfway past, a lorry wanted to overtake him, he did so, turning a two-lane road into a three-lane one-way system.

So what if a bus was trying to pass and found itself on a collision course with something coming the other way? Who gives way?

‘Simple,’ says Hormazd. ‘Whoever is smaller. In India, might is right. You only give way to vehicles that are bigger than yours.’

So, if while overtaking, the bus finds itself head to head with a car, the car driver heads for the ditch. If, on the other hand, it’s a big truck, the bus will swerve back onto his side of the road… where I was.

Of course, if the bus had found itself heading for another bus of an identical size and weight, you’d have read about the accident on page 17 in the
Daily Telegraph
the next day.

Things were pretty bad just on the flat coastal plain, but as the road started to get all mountainous it became stupid. It was taking minutes for a bus to crawl past us, during which time we’d gone through six or maybe seven hairpin bends.

Little wonder, at the road’s highest point, you slow down to throw money into a small temple, giving thanks for your safe passage so far. I gave the guys there my Amex card and turned for home. I’d seen enough.

But in town, there was more. On the basis that ‘might is right’, lorries are at the top of the tree, followed by buses, then vans, cows, cars and, right at the bottom, auto-rickshaws.

Used primarily as taxis, these three-seater subcontinental Robin Reliants are pretty much invisible to all other road users. Crush someone’s goat and the villagers
will lynch you. Destroy an auto-rickshaw and nobody seems to notice.

I know this because I drove one. I was on a main road, seeing if it really was true that it could do 40 mph, when a car just pulled out of a side turning in front of me. Luckily, I was able to stop, but the truck behind just kept on coming. He didn’t brake, he didn’t attempt to swerve and he was going to flatten me unless I got going again right away.

If other road users don’t get you in a rickshaw, the potholes will. If you don’t see them coming, the first indication that you’ve been over a bump comes when your spine snaps.

But even if you can avoid all the other traffic and the potholes, there’s another nasty in store. Cancer.

All of India’s cities are polluted but Calcutta has to be seen to be believed – not that you can see it. A spokesman for the World Health Organisation said they’d stopped listing cities in order of environmental risk because the press just latched on to one place, labelling it as the dirtiest place on earth and ignoring the fact that a hundred other places were very nearly as bad.

But he did say, unofficially, that Calcutta is in a league of its own.

Officially, the real reason for the all-pervading smoke is that everyone cooks on open fires, but that’s nonsense. The fault lies fairly and squarely with the diesel engine.

It’s an inefficient fuel at the best of times, smoky and carcinogenic, but mix it with badly maintained motors and you simply would not believe the result. Every car in
Calcutta is a Hindustan and every one belches a poisonous cocktail which has blackened the buildings and reduced visibility to just a hundred yards or so. The visibility at midday was exactly the same as it was at midnight.

I was there three days and it was like the hayfever attack from hell. My eyes streamed, my nose ran and it tasted like I’d been sucking boiled sweets made from crude oil.

Calcutta had two other drawbacks, too. First, every single patch of green was covered with cricketers 24 hours a day.

And second, the producer stepped in some human excrement which someone had left on the pavement, and it splashed all over his jeans. That was bad enough but the hotel laundry then ironed creases in them, rendering them useless.

Calcutta is shit.

Madras is not.

It was in Madras that I took part in the Blind Man’s Rally, a charity do where able-sighted drivers chauffeur blind navigators on a day-long treasure hunt.

The car was an awful Maruti Jeep, I had never been to Madras before and my navigator had the worst BO in the history of the world. Things were bad and they got worse when I saw the instructions.

They were in Braille, which my instructor could read, but the Braille was in English, which he could not understand.

So, at every junction, he would spell out, letter by letter, what it said. Or rather, what he thought it said. His fingers would dart over the paper and then he’d look up with a
pleased smile on his face and say, ‘Y-J-R-R-U-V.’ Well I know I didn’t go to university but I’m pretty damn sure that is not a word. And nor was I-I-J-V-V-K-O-Y-Y. And nor, indeed, were any subsequent attempts.

We were helped by the man’s astonishing knowledge of Madras which meant that, at any given point, he knew exactly where we were. But at the same time, we were hindered hugely by the fact that neither of us knew where we were supposed to be.

Madras is not an especially big city but by some miracle, we managed to miss every single one of the fifteen checkpoints. We also lost the crew, who were supposed to be filming our attempts. And we were so late back, dinner was finished.

But that said, when I’m on my deathbed and someone asks me which day I would most like to relive, it would be that one. I laughed more at that endless stream of letters than I did when I once saw Lord Longford fall over.

This is the point with India. If you can ignore the very obvious poverty, the leprosy and their staggering inability to drive motor vehicles, it is a funny place.

And we have America to thank for that. Whereas the superpower’s tentacles have infiltrated pretty well every other country on earth to the point that, even in Peking, people know of Bruce Springsteen, India is clean.