Paving a Road to Hell: Highways, Safety, Life and the Indian Republic

Addressing the Goan public on Republic Day, one of the many bits of paternal advice that the Governor of our State chose to impart was with regards to roads. He lamented that there were over 300 young deaths on the roads every year. The widening of roads he therefore argued, (he meant the controversial highway expansion project) was necessary to take care of the ever growing vehicular traffic and to contain incidents of road mishaps.

It’s a wonder that the Goan public are not already tired of the truckloads of gratuitous advice that they get from all quarters. These various patriarchs seemed convinced that the Goan public is like some misguided barque of youth that need to be guided into calm and responsible waters. Fortunately for this Goan public however, a good amount of their actions are actually sensible, far-sighted, and it is these patriarchs who would be better served by wider reading.

The cause for deaths on Goan roads is not their narrow width. On the contrary, if the narrow roads contribute to anything, it is to limit the number of deaths one would encounter if the roads were any wider. It is a rather simple fact of physics that the faster one’s vehicle is moving, the greater the impact and the greater the extent of injuries. Narrow roads, and the fact of people and animals moving across them, serve to slow down traffic and make these roads people and life-friendly. Wider highways on the other hands are veritable death-traps. They allow for faster movement, and when in such fast moving vehicles, it makes more sense to ram into the animal or vehicle that makes the mistake of being in your path, than swerving to try and avoid this obstruction. You can swerve to avoid an accident best when traveling at a slower pace. As inconvenient as it may be then, the increasing number of vehicles on Goan (and Indian) roads probably works to our advantage, by reducing speed and saving lives. If there is a reason for the number of deaths on Goan roads, then it must be credited to the high speeds at which we attempt to travel. Blame this on the increasing capacities of vehicles and the misguided sense of style and liberation we get from being in or on fast vehicles. And so sorry Mr. Governor, but you need to marshal better facts, if you are to convince this unruly, troublesome Goan public that they should not be opposing the highway expansion project.

While on the subject of speed, I was recently made aware of the reasons for the low speed limits on bridges; 40 in the case of the Mandovi and 30 in the case of the Zuari. It turns out that if you have an unceasing flow of traffic coursing at high speeds over the bridges the bridge too starts to sway with the speed of the traffic. This eventually leads to stress that the structure has not been designed to deal with and sooner or later one winds up with rather catastrophic end to the bridge. The speed limit is obviously there for a purpose. Speed however is something that we seem to take as a fundamental right and it is hard to drive on either of these bridges without getting some speed-crazy maniac trying to overtake you or honk the living daylights out of you.

To return to the issue of highways though, what we need to recognize is that highways are not built primarily for local people to traverse through the State, but for larger vehicles – commercial carriers- to get to point A to point B as fast as possible. This is not to make a nativist argument, but to point out that this process is not without impact on the populations that fall on the route of these super-highways. Thus highways may connect people, but they also separate them. They divide villages into two portions and to a large extent prevent normal communication between these two segments of the village. No longer is it possible for a person to walk across the road to visit the shop or chapel or temple across the road. Underpasses are prone to flooding, overhead bridges inconvenient for the physically challenged and the infirm, and they are often spaced too far apart to be convenient for a pedestrian. Not only do highways separate, they also evict persons. Entire lifetimes that were spent building a home, or tending to an orchard are destroyed as quickly as you can ‘land-grab scam’.

The kind of super-highways that the Goan public is being pushed to accept makes sense in the vast unpopulated spaces of the United States. They make sense in places where people have been forced to stop walking and get into vehicles for every single requirement. This has ofcourse come with its own curse of social anomie and high death rates on highways. Highways also invariably come with undemocratic forms of government. It is all part of a package deal.

For these and other reasons, it is therefore strange that the Governor chose to urge Goan members of the Indian Republic to acquiesce to highways on Republic Day…but of late, most strange are the logics of the Indian Republic.

(A version of this blog was first published in the Gomantak Times 2 Feb 2011)

Life and the Road: Celebrating the life-affirming principles of India’s streets

Speak with the expatriate white folk living in India, an NRI, or similar people, and you will invariably hear an unending litany of complaints about the state of our roads and the manner in which people drive. The situation is described as uncivilized; chaotic, annoying, life-threatening and deadly. And indeed, from time to time it may be. India does have a rather high level of deaths from road accidents. Figures suggest that almost one Goan dies every day on Goan roads, no insignificant figure. I would however, like to present an alternate view of our roads and notions of transport by contrasting two perspectives. The first is one that sees roads and transportation from what I would call a life-affirming perspective, the other the death perspective.

The thoughts expressed in this column occurred to me as I drove through Panjim city, an unwilling occupant of a Tata Safari. Hulking above all of the other traffic in the city, the driver sitting next to me was impatient to unleash the power of the vehicle on the road. Unfortunately, the rest of the universe seemed to conspire against him. People crossed the road, cycles meandered from one lane to another, other vehicles wove in and out of lanes. Life in all its manifestations was spilling out onto the streets interrupting the realization of his dream of smooth and speedy traffic. Slowly negotiating through the crowds was not an option, a speedy movement away was the goal.

What we have here is exactly the conflict between the life affirming perspective and that of death. One perspective seeks the roads as the space to make connections; commercial, social, even amorous. It stresses connectivity, and asserts that time is not of essence. On the contrary, a surfeit of time works to cement these connections. In this happy street scenario, the driver too is invited to participate; smiling, squabbling even, encouraging an obstruction out of his way. Moving, but always engaging as he does so.

The dominant logic regarding roads however sees roads as potential highways. In doing so, it unfortunately asserts a logic of disconnection. Roll up your glasses, block out the external environment, (don’t forget to turn on the AC!) and move speedily from one point to another. The road is the space to indicate your power, and the vehicle and its speed the manner to indicate it. To be sure, if the driver of the Safari bought the death perspective, it was not the driver to blame, but the situation that he found himself while sitting behind that driver’s wheel. The machine is constructed to push life aside and head resolutely towards its destination. We are encouraged through so many mechanisms – advertisements being one major force – to understand all roads as highways. Vehicles and transport are to be understood primarily in this manner. It is little wonder then, that we have so many deaths on our roads. The roads have been constructed to kill, not just physically, but socially, culturally and economically as well.

We should remember the international origins of the modern highway lie in the history of the German autobahn. Wide and smooth, they were built to facilitate automobile travel and to exclude older forms of travel. Though embraced by the Nazi administration, the dream of the autobahn seduced all of the industrial world, since it promised the realization of the industrial dream. In this dream everything (including humans) were seen as machines, worthy of existence only if they could produce to feed the economy. Habitations were seen as production centres where humans worked as machines, or tended machines that produced. Roads connected one production centre to another, and the landscape, no matter how challenging, was to be domesticated to aid this larger project of production (and consumption). The fervour with which the industrial world embraced the idea of the highway suggests to us that the fascist dictatorships of Europe were only the more pernicious forms of industrial society. There is something terribly wrong with the industrial model itself that demands the death of social relations, and shoves aside the slow and the weak. This internal logic is made manifest for us to read through the design of highways and the manner we are urged to consider all roads, highways.

For those familiar with the grand highways of Europe and the US, you will know that there is no life around these highways. Indeed the life that dares enter these zones winds up dead, as roadkill. The commerce on the highway is in the form of the anonymous hospitality of corporate chains, serving uniform, unhealthy food. There is a pattern here we must not miss.

In India on the other hand, as so many of these Europeans tell us, we don’t have highways. We don’t have highways since life in all its glory explodes onto these zones and domesticates these potentially cold, anonymous, dignity-denying spaces. The accidents that we see on Indian roads are the result of the inevitable conflict between these two perspectives. It is a conflict between those that affirm life, and those that have decided to run over it. The accidents are also the logical result of the death perspective, that is built on a negation of human values and of human unpredictability. When human error does manifest itself on these highways, or even roads polluted by the autobahn logic, the number of deaths are catastrophic. These deaths are the most evident cost of the industrial common sense that insists on a machine existence.

From within the death affirming principle of industrialism, surely our roads are a huge mess and a death trap. However, if we embrace the life-affirming perspective it is possible that we would begin to see roads, vehicles and travel from an entirely different point of view! Civilization at the end of the day needs to be geared toward the recognition of life, not its negation.

(Published in the Gomantak Times, 2nd Sept 2009)