NEW DELHI – It doesn’t take a Harvard degree to figure out that driving in New Delhi is hazardous to your health. Close calls, reckless weaving and cars blithely going the wrong way are highlights of the daily daredevil derby.
But a recent study by economists from Harvard and other American universities suggests that, indeed, a majority of this city’s drivers get their licenses without actually knowing how to operate a car. They ply the roads because of a simple fact: government corruption.
As many as 75 percent of motorists in New Delhi obtain their permits by hiring agents whose palm-greasing intervention saves them time, energy and the hassle of learning the difference between the brake and the accelerator, the report says.
Those with agents bypass long waits in dingy government offices and almost never have to submit to the road test that’s required of all would-be drivers. In fact, when newly licensed motorists who participated in the study were given a driving exam, more than 60 percent flunked.
“We had five questions about how to start a car, how to change gears, and how they worked, which are very basic questions,” said Marianne Bertrand, a professor at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and a co-author of the report. “They couldn’t answer them.”
Evidence of such cluelessness is thick on the ground in India’s capital, where getting from point A to point B is a white-knuckle exercise and traffic safety seems an oxymoron.
Each day, more than 4 million vehicles jockey for position along narrow lanes that wind through ancient bazaars or boulevards originally designed for the horse-drawn carriages and stately cars of India’s British colonial elite.
Rules of the road exist, but mainly on paper. On the streets, it’s the law of the jungle.
Bus drivers cut off motorcyclists, truckers dodge cows, entire families squeeze onto a single scooter, three-wheel “auto rickshaws” zip in between everyone else, and those on foot utter prayers and curses in equal measure.
It’s a raucous free-for-all where the most important piece of advice is found painted on the backs of taxis and trucks: “Horn please.”
“They drive like they’re pedestrians. If it’s faster to go the wrong way up the street, they’ll do it. They have no sense of danger,” said one exasperated British executive who ventures out behind the wheel only on weekends. “You have to be vigilant all the time.”
In 2004, Delhi Traffic Police logged 9,083 accidents, in which 1,832 people died. That’s an average of five auto-related fatalities a day in a city that boasts 14 million people but only 2.6 million licensed drivers, a Transportation Ministry official said.
Many accidents in New Delhi occur at night, when some motorists drive with their lights off in the belief that their car batteries will last longer.
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