Licensing + Bureaucracy = Long Lines + Bribery…Massachusetts got 3 out of 4

"You never want to share the road with someone who truly believes in reincarnation"

Anyone within earshot of CNN earlier this month could not have missed the announcement at the New Delhi Auto Expo of Tata Motor’s “Nano”, a one-lakh ($2,500), thirty HP, two-cylinder, one-wiper blade car. Most of the world-wide buzz centered on either the market significance of the new car’s price point or around the spectre of its environmental impact once 30 or 40 million of these things hit the streets. 

Driving in India? You'll need one of these and, well, some big ones. 

But here at DLA, researchers knew that 30 or 40 million new cars would easily equate to 300 to 400 million new drivers. Where and how would they would learn to drive could provide DLA research staff with an in situ opportunity to glean behavioral insights from another country in our effort to understand Boston’s ass-like driving.

Unfortunately, as often seems to be the case, DLA’s trademark—the thoughtful, deliberate response to driving behavior—was, while certainly thoughtful, a bit too deliberate and we were trumped by Somini Sengupta's piece in the January 11 The New York Times, “Indians Hit the Road Amid Elephants.” Sengupta’s piece looks at driving driving and licensing issues in India while following Mr. Sharma, who, as a beneficiary of India’s booming economy, purchases his first car and takes it for a spin, despite the fact that he has never driven before. Of course, hilarity and mishaps ensue, and, after Mr. Sharama knocks over a friend and his brother hits a motorcyclist, the decision is made to avail themselves of driving lessons.

Based on this anecdote (and the mention of driving lessons), the DLA staff dropped their lattes, grabbed their notebooks, and hunkered down to their work with the hope that India could provide insight into that holy grail of DLA research: whence Boston’s compulsion for driving like ass.

 
Taking the Driving Exam? You’ll need to know these important signals and signs
Courtesy of: Indian Driving Schools

Two things became evident immediately to DLA researchers.

First, driving in India is, most likely, more shamelessly profligate than that of any other country. Even a cursory Google search reveals an incalculable number of publications, blogs, sites, reports, analyses, and desperate novenae—anguished and hysterical—attesting to this observation. Ms. Sengupta’s description of Indian drivers sharing the road with “a bicyclist with three cooking-gas cylinders strapped to the back of his bike, a pushcart vendor plying guavas, and a cycle rickshaw loaded with a photocopy machine” pales beside stories and pictures of driving misses, near-misses, and spot-on no-misses. Indian driving videos on YouTube are consistently more watched than tornados, building demolitions, or celebrity wardrobe malfunctions. Cows, monkeys, elephants and more than one billion two-legged species of pedestrians create a head-shaking traffic nightmare that prompts one national tourist organization to advise visiting drivers, “If by any chance, you get involved in an automobile accident, wait until the police arrive and make a report. However, if a crowd gathers and appears hostile, immediately leave the place and go to the nearest police station to file an accident report.” Sound advice.

Words to Live By: The Indian Driving Creed
Courtesy of: Indian Driving Schools

So worrisome is the state of driving in India that even the prime minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, picked up the banner when, at a stone-laying ceremony for a mammoth road construction project aimed at relieving traffic congestion at Electronic City in Bangalore, he told the crowd, "Mere wind-swept roads and fancy cars alone do not reflect progress…good road manners and discipline are equally important. We Indians behave with great courtesy at home and with our family and friends. But when we go out we leave these good manners. On the road, we lose control of our good senses. Why should this be so? Why can't we be more polite to each other, more caring and respectful of each other?”

"Why can't we all just get along?" PM Singh pleads his case
Photo: Government of India Press Information Bureau

Ahh, yes…why not? This takes us to our second research finding: that India ranks as one of the world’s great cradles of corruption and, it seems, in India the word “venality” is synonymous with “DMV”. While the corruption of India’s bureaucracy is certainly not surprising in and of itself, that it was so well documented was something of an eye-opener here at DLA. And one case particularly got our attention.

In 2006, researchers from Harvard, University of Chicago, NYU, and the IFC, conducted a study with 1,000 drivers permit applicants in New Delhi in which one group was offered a financial “bonus” if they could obtain their licenses quickly. Yawns all around when it was found that the “cash incented” applicants were able to get their licenses 40% faster and with a 20% greater success rate than those in the control group. Among the study’s findings are 1) bureaucrats create red tape by arbitrarily failing drivers, independent of their actual driving skills; 2) the bureaucracy is insensitive to social needs (by awarding licenses irrespective of skill; 3) the “bureaucracy was responsive to individual needs”, a charmingly benign description of bribery.

This study made the rounds of most news agencies and cut a fairly wide swath through the blog world including Indian blogs, Indian ex-pat blogs, driving blogs, research blogs, and economics blogs…even making it to Slate. Much of the blog buzz was around policy, government, and economics, although some discussion rummaged around in the ethics issues, leaving many staffers here at DLA stunned by the thought of even a casual relationship between driving and ethics.

Without straying too far afield in this matter, let us briefly say that this study was performed to explore a particular view among certain sociologists and political scientists that corruption can be socially beneficial. As described by Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, “[I]n terms of economic growth, the only thing worse than a society with a rigid, overcentralized, dishonest bureaucracy is one with a rigid, overcentralized, and honest bureaucracy.” The thinking is that corruption provides a means of circumventing the unimportant parts of regulation and, it is presumed, speeding the overall process, at least for the persistent or the rich.¹

¹Huntington , S.P. (1968). “Modernization and Corruption.” Political Order in Changing Societies , (New Haven: Yale University Press)

Such theories would go a long way towards explaining India’s world-class corruption: India’s smothering bureaucracy, resulting from its post-independence, planned economy policy, crafted an elaborate maze of licenses, regulations and red tape unmatched in modern government known in India as the “License Raj.” The goal of License Raj to insure that investment, licenses, permits and the like went to economically sound, nationally beneficial programs, but resulted in an economy with little competition, stifled growth, an obdurate class system. The constriction of the License Raj became a fact of daily life in India until reforms under Rajiv Gandhi in 1990.

But old habits die hard, as evidenced by the study. It India, long lines, tedious regulations, and insensate workers at the any of India’s Regional Transport Offices (RTO) are part of a natural selection process in which greasing a bureaucrat’s wheel gets you behind the wheel faster. It also gets the unqualified, the undeserving, and the ass-like behind the wheel faster. In fact, when given a surprise, independent driving test after receiving their licenses, 69% of the “bonus” group failed, compared with only 11% of the group that received lessons.

Which get us back to Boston where, sadly, bribery is not likely to be a deciding factor in the driver’s license process. And yet, the roadways are flooded with motorists driving like ass. This must be his is where Massachusetts really missed the boat. Certainly, if bribery were the motivation behind long lines at the registry, as suggested by this study—or if it could account for the legions of ass-like drivers on Boston’s roads—then the DLA research staff would feel better about things knowing that there was some economic reason behind this behavioral phenomenon. As it is, the DLA staff went back to their lattes having confirmed, once again, that poor driving—even extravagantly reckless driving as practiced in India—does not necessarily constitute ass-like driving. (See Learning to Drive #1, Learning to Drive #2)

Mr. Sharma, the focus of Ms. Sengupta ’s article, had a far simpler, yet unsatisfying, conclusion: “We have a knack for breaking laws.” Now THAT deserves a license