The Indian Road

The India road is a metaphor for Indian life. All Indian life (with only one or two exceptions) takes place on the roads and streets of the subcontinent. Most readers have the concept of a road as a linear travel route for the efficient movement of wheeled vehicles from Point A to Point B.

This is not the primary use of Indian roads. It is not even the secondary or tertiary use of roads. Here roads are public spaces for sitting, discussing, arguing, sleeping, waiting, playing games (ranging from cards and board games to cricket) moving livestock, ejecting all kinds of bodily waste materials, drying crops, drying laundry, parking vehicles, repairing vehicles, placing piles of construction materials and rocks, in small villages the holding of weddings, protests, celebrations and festivals, the list could go on and on.

One of the most interesting use of roads I have come across is the use of them as threshing floors. In many places, the farmers will neatly pile at a thickness of 6” the dried plants containing the crop seeds across the entire road surface except the 6-12” next to the road edge to avoid any losses. So during the day the traffic drives back and forth over the plants while the farmers regularly turn over the crop and keep it in neat piles. By evening time the crop is fully threshed and they remove the plants and sweep up the seeds.

This is fine for the four-wheelers (the term for non two-wheeled vehicles) but for two-wheelers  such as myself this can be a problem as the mat of plants can be slippery. So I have learned to use the 6 or so inches left on the side of the road.

Now I will move on to the topic of road condition and the science of road archaeology. Road conditions vary wildly. A few 4 lane highways built recently that are equal to or surpass similar highways in the US and Europe. One that definitely surpasses that comes to mind is the new Yamuna Expressway that connects Delhi with Agra. It is 8 lanes of perfectly smooth tarmac with virtually no traffic. It is a toll road so all the truck traffic remains crowding the nearly parallel highway that goes between the two cities. 

On the other side of the spectrum are highways that are so bad that top speed is 5-7 MPH and most of the travel is weaving back and forth trying to find a way through the holes and remnant pavement so as to not rip off you oil pan or breaking an axle. Now at this point you may be thinking that I am exaggerating but I am not at all. In fact, I was on such a road and passed one four-wheeler (bikes are faster than four-wheelers on all but the very best roads because a four-wheeler has to find two parallel routes with the distance between them being the distance between the left and right tires, whereas the bike only has to find one single track that is passable) I digress, and just as I was about to overtake the poor fellow, some remnant pavement ripped his oil pan off spewing his precious motor oil across the road and resulting in a very bad day or two until it could be repaired.

Traveling bad roads is like seeing geology exposed. On the surface there will be the fine asphalt. But depending on the quality of the oil used to make the asphalt it will either crumble to powder, break up in chunks or if it was proper quality do its job and remain a road surface, below this you will find gravel in the 1-2” diameter range that is generally covered/held together with some other oil based material. On this material is set the surface material. Often (Virtually all roads but the big highways), there is an oil product applied to bond the two layers, here it is applied by hand instead of truck sprayer, in either a modified watering can or a bucket with holes drilled in the bottom. 

You may be thinking what does this have to do with road condition, but as you will see, very much. Because it is applied by hand with the swinging of the arm, its applied in concentric rings across the road and because it is applied by hand (and is a major expense in road building) there are areas that receive too little to do the bonding properly. So as these roads decay they develop a washboard, in the strips that received proper amounts of the tar the surface is still attached, where as the areas with insufficient tar have eroded away. The result being bone jarring rattle.

Now getting back to the archaeology, when the surface pavement washes away and the 1-2” material mentioned above has been broken up and washed away you get down to the ‘bedrock’ of the road which is generally 2-6” rocks hand laid with dirt packing.

So it is easy to get an approximate dating of road maintenance. If its just the surface inch of asphalt that is the problem its likely the road was laid/maintained in the last few years,  if you are on the rough underlayment it is likely 5-10 and if you are driving on dirt >10

Many roads are one lane, and so when two vehicle meet, one or both have to move partially off the road. The problem with this system is that the side of the road is dirt and when you combine the vehicle traffic with monsoon rains you get major erosion of the shoulders. So you can have 3-12” difference between the pavement and the shoulder. This is not a problem for busses and trucks with 36-40” diameter tires, but for cars and vans which have very small tires this can be problematic. On bike it is not so bad because  a bad case scenario you can just drive off the road and use the shoulder until you can find a place where the pavement and shoulder are close enough to drive back on. On a bike, between the two wheels is the frame so you cant do too much damage when the pavement hits the frame.

Now moving on to vehicles. Only a very few vehicles have break lights. Newer vehicles generally have some functional break lights but even that is not guaranteed. I was close behind a very new car maybe two years old and he threw on the breaks but no lights. Why this is the case is unknown as in the US its quite rare to have a tail light bulb burn out. I have had vehicles well over 20 year old and the lights had never burned out.

All but new cars you have to assume there are no lights. When passing truck and buses you often have to follow behind them at 1-3’ in order to be able to pass. You have to become very attuned to the distance between you and the truck as you get no other feedback that he has slammed on the breaks to avoid a pothole or the like.

Now you may be thinking that there must be a lot of accidents and deaths and dismemberments and yes there are, but that will have to be another post.

Another amazing thing is that drivers of all sorts of vehicles think nothing about stopping in the middle of the road. These stops can be as short as a few minute to as long as a week. Trucks and buses in particular when they break down they don’t even think to pull to the side of the road, they merely stop wherever they notice the problem. Then what happens is a temporary garage/workshop gets set up while the vehicle is disassembled, the offending parts removed, taken to be worked on and then replaced.

Why the thought does not cross the mind that it would be a good idea to move off the road to do this is unknown and probably unknowable.