Of highways and *lowways

WITH EYES WIDE OPEN

D. N. Bezboruah

When I first started driving a car in 1951 (after having passed the stiff test for a driving licence in those days) at the ‘legal’ age of 18, we did not have highways in Assam. We just had two–lane roads. We did not even have the word highways to refer to roads that linked our district headquarters. And yet, we had imported cars that were rugged enough even for our rougher roads. Since India had not started either assembling or manufacturing cars (except the early Hindustan versions), foreign exporters obviously had no idea of what kind of cars were suitable for Indian roads of those days. They just sent us cars that they manufactured for Britain, the United States, Germany or France. Had they been more familiar with Indian road conditions, they might well have concentrated on Jeeps or vehicles that were designed on the lines of Jeeps. But even a State like Assam had Fords, Chevrolets, Plymouths, Dodges and Austins plying on what was called the ‘trunk roads’ of the State. And if the word highway is of recent coige (for Assam), the word *lowway does not exist. It is something that I have coined as an opposite of highway.  

Way back in the 1950s, we just had two–lane trunk roads that linked district headquarters. These trunk roads had tarmac toppings part of the way but not all the way. But there were high–power six–cylinder and eight–cylinder cars that did not let the driver feel the lack of good highways. In any case, there were so few cars on our trunk roads that road accidents were very rare. A lot of drivers were able to cover the distance between Guwahati and Jorhat in five hours (not counting the halts). Today, many drivers cover the distance in just four hours. I remember driving from Tinsukia to Guwahati in seven–and–a–half hours in the 1960s and regarding this as a great achievement.

The scerio has changed drastically during the last few decades. We now have four–lane highways for a greater part of the same journey, and ‘safe speeds’ are much higher these days than they were in the 1950s. What this should do to the spirit of adventure is to make more and more motorists think of taking the road not taken more often in order to arrive at unknown, unvisited destitions. The scerio has changed drastically in other ways as well. Nowadays we drive cars over which we have much less control as far as  knowledge of the working of their engines is concerned. The cars we drove in the1960s and 1970s were far less sophisticated and therefore far less complicated than the ones we drive today. It was a matter of pride for motorists like us that we were able to tune our engines and get better fuel efficiency from the cars we drove. Some of us were able to extract unbelievably high mileages from our cars because we fine–tuned our engines for the best performance. Today, there is no way of doing anything like that. Microprocessors control automobile engines, and enthusiastic motorists have no way of doing anything about how well their engines are going to behave. Half–a–century ago automobile manufacturers had no reason to find ways of preventing motorists from looking after their cars to the best of their abilities. I regard the present situation as a sad turn of events. If a car refuses to move somewhere on the way, we have no way of finding out what has gone wrong. Everything around the engine is to tightly packed under the bonnet that one has no way of even identifying what has gone wrong. When I was a young motorist, we had fairly well established ways of identifying what could be amiss. There were fairly easy ways of checking whether the fuel supply was working and then going on to check the electrical system for glitches. Those of us who never had a chauffeur in our young motoring days carried a good set of tools as well as several spares like fan belts, radiator hoses, spark plugs, fuses, headlight bulbs and a spare tube in addition to the spare wheel. Someone like me who has put in over half–a–million miles of driving has had to do his share of on–road repairs as well. Today, I know there are any number of young motorists who have driven more than I have but perhaps without having to bother about on–road repairs. In fact, road repairs one can undertake today are limited by the parts of the car to which one has access.

One of the long motoring trips I had undertaken was from Guwahati to Mysore in a Fiat car along with my uncle who was an acknowledged expert on automobile engines. [He could take a car engine apart, bore the cylinders to the required size and reassemble it with the pistons and piston rings of the required size.] It took us nine days to get to Mysore because we did quite a bit of sightseeing on the way. But we did the last 35 hours virtually non–stop except for meals. The trip was a great learning experience for me as I had to cope with nine punctures on the way. Some of them happened late in the evening and in totally deserted locations. During my years in Mysore, I took the family on a motoring trip to Goa, and later on covered almost the entire peninsula right down to Kanniyakumari, returning along the picturesque Kerala coast. We were even waylaid by a band of four robbers armed with sticks near Thirulveli on the way to Kanniyakumari at about 2 a.m.. I maged to dodge them by pretending to stop and then zipping off as they approached the car. It was the kind of rrow escape one can never forget.

As a motorist, I feel greatly let down at the condition of the highways in Assam. We have four–lane highways today where we had nothing better than the two–lane trunk roads. But the quality of our road surfaces are not up to the mark when we make comparisons with the highways connecting Delhi and Jaipur or Delhi and Ahmedabad or Cheni and Bengaluru or Mumbai and Pune. A highway is recognized by the quality of work that has gone into its making and the durability of the work. In Assam or Meghalaya it is possible to identify certain stretches of highways that have been built by reputed contractors because they remain in good condition for many years without any need for repairs. But this is not enough when one is talking of highways or expressways. We need uniform and consistent stretches of quality work all through for highways to remain highways. Good stretches alterting with poorly constructed ones will simply not do. And there is a lot that the PWD can do to ensure consistent quality work by seeking the opinions of motorists who frequently use our highways. The PWD must seek the opinions of motorists about different stretches of our highways by providing them questionires on their driving experience on the desigted stretches. So far no such opinion seeking has been in evidence in any part of Assam. Any PWD that cares for its road users ought to be undertaking such exercises in a democracy. It is only such departments of the government that are totally unconcerned about the people that can choose to ignore public opinion completely. In fact, some mobilization of public opinion is needed to ensure that public opinion will be sought by government departments whose work directly affects the people. It is time we made a beginning in such matters.   

It is saddening to think of the large number of highway accidents in Assam. I have even heard of people talking about the hundreds of human lives that our highways have taken as though the highways had powers of volition. The fact remains that even though our highways do not match up to the better highways in the country that I referred to earlier, they are much smoother and wider than what we had four or five decades ago. Add to this scerio much more powerful cars as well as a very large number of incompetent motorists hoping to be better. Their urge for speed is generally very strong. So we have an unholy combition calculated to produce highway accidents. The motorist who ought to be everyone’s role model is not someone who can drive fast, but rather someone who can drive safely without taking much more time than the driver dedicated solely to speed. It is useful to keep in mind that something inimate like a highway cannot take human lives. It is daredevil motorists with illusions of immortality who end up taking their own lives and often the lives of others as well through their craze for speed. All motorists must accept the responsibility of using our highways safely.