Delhi Roads

It’s now the monsoon season in Delhi, and whilst the rains have been relatively light this year, they have still played havoc with the state of the roads. Many of the roads around here are not in a great state anyway, but the rains seem to tear them up with huge potholes appearing overnight. Much of the time, on our local neighbourhood roads, we are driving cautiously, zigzagging across the road trying to find the way through that will cause least damage to our suspension.

When these potholes appear, the local authority have a very functional approach to repairs. A couple of men – or sometimes women, will appear with a wooden hand-cart loaded up with a pile of broken bricks and mud. They then tip the cart out into the general area of the holes. They then spend the next couple of hours bashing the bricks with spades and hammers until they roughly fill the hole. This process does of course leave lots of protruding bricks ready to do all sorts of damage to your tyres, but after a couple of days, enough people have driven over it to level it to some degree.

One of the best sights of the monsoon is the little children from the small slum near our house. As soon as the downpours started, they were out in the street enjoying the rain, playing in the puddles, splashing each other and having such fun.

Driving in India is great fun. At first it looks like a free-for-all with no rules at all. In fact, there are rules, but they are just different. Pulling out into traffic takes some nerve because you don’t wait for a gap – you make one. Constant use of the horn is mandatory, otherwise someone will definitely pull out and into you. There is also a great degree of flexibility about which side of the road you should drive on. Technically, people drive on the left – unless it will be quicker to drive up the right side of the road – or down the middle.

Last week, we were driving home at night up a major dual-carriageway. For some reason, our side of the road was completely jammed. There was, however, a gap in the central reservation and so a number of cars, ourselves included, went through the gap and up the other side against the traffic in what should have been the fast lane of the other carriageway. I will have to try that on the M25 when we get back to the UK.