1. Introduction: flying over
On 23 November 2019, the southern Indian city of Hyderabad witnessed a road accident—one that dominated news headlines locally and nationally for its chilling uniqueness. A Volkswagen GT, being driven at 104 kmph by a man in his late 20s, flew off the newly constructed Biodiversity FlyoverFootnote 1 in the city and landed on a woman in her 50s who was standing under the flyover, trying to hail an autorickshaw. The car landed on her and killed her instantly while also grievously injuring two other women who were standing next to her. News channels were quick to dub the incident a “freak accident.” Several news anchors pointed to the fact that the speed limit on the flyover is 40 kmph and since the driver was driving at 104 kmph, the blame was placed squarely on the driver of the car. As I watched the grainy CCTV footage on loop—much like several of my interlocutors, friends, and family who were similarly shocked at the dramatic absurdity of it all—I could not help but recall the celebratory announcements that accompanied the inauguration of this highly anticipated flyover just 19 days prior to this incident. An important route in the Information Technology corridor in the city, the Biodiversity Flyover was meant to provide relief from the chaotic and congested roads below—a signal-free and quick escape, and a symbol of infrastructural modernity. This dramatic accident, however, brought up more classic concerns around rule-obedience, traffic indiscipline, the entitlement of elites on Indian roads, and how speeding has long been key to consolidating masculine identities. It also served as a gruesome reminder of the degree to which pedestrians, bystanders, and people who depend on public transportation are vulnerable to the intrinsic risks of motor vehicles.
However, some politicians, celebrities, state officials, and researchers in the city also pointed out that the design of the flyover—two tricky and sharp S-curves within dangerous proximity to one another—was culpable in the driver losing control of the vehicle (The New Indian Express, 2019). Reckless speed or danger by design? A flagrant violation of laws of the road or a more invisible violation of road codes and building regulations? This question volleyed around newsrooms. While road deaths are all too common in India, with the country recording at least 400 road deaths a day (Biswas, Reference Biswas2025), the “spectacular” nature of this incident and the classed inequities it shed light on attracted more public attention and demands for accountability. As Aseela Haque notes in the context of Karachi, “affective conceptions of flyovers are meant to impart these structures as milestones that are important to achieve for Karachi and its citizens in order to perform progress and rise in global city hierarchies. Driving and driving well, therefore, are the performative forces signalling those shifts” (Haque, Reference Haque2024, p. 4). The Biodiversity Flyover incident, thus, became the site of wider “infrastructural anxieties” (Venhovens and Chettri, Reference Venhovens and Chettri2024)—a reminder of unfinished modernity as much as it was the icon and enabler of motoring aspirations in the city.
Following this dramatic incident, the flyover was shut down. It remained closed for a little over a month. During this time, an expert panel was constituted with engineers providing inputs on how to make this flyover safer. Amongst the recommendations that were put in place were a series of “speed calming” measures including rumble strips placed across several stretches on the flyover, higher railings along the flyover, several signposts warning drivers of the curves ahead, several speed limit signposts, CCTV surveillance of the flyover, and voice announcements that caution motorists against stopping to take selfies. The flyover that indexed the promise of seamless and smooth movement in the city—suspended above the slowness, density, and chaos of road traffic below—was now a tightly regulated site where slowness was enforced and encouraged through punitive, pedagogical, and physical mechanisms. While the CCTV cameras were reminders that “over-speeding”Footnote 2 might invite traffic tickets, voice announcements that blared from loudspeakers reminded commuters to go slow and to not stop when on the flyover. Rumble strips nudged motorists to slow down. In fact, following this incident, the police installed a series of rumble strips and similar cautionary regulatory measures on other flyovers and bridges in the city that were identified as prime spots for speeding. As Mark Lamont notes:
road deaths establish the relation between accident and routine in the sense that while coming without warning, the bureaucratic procedures of tracing back onto the crash all factors that precipitated it – humans and animals, road design and repair, weather and light conditions, automobile maintenance and speed – reveal a logics of causality and a jurisprudence of responsibility that is already institutionalized and expected, but also transformed by it and transformative of it (Lamont, Reference Lamont2012, p. 181; also see Phippard, Reference Phippard2023).
A plethora of cautionary measures—visible, physical, visceral—emerged to manage and regulate a motoring public that is apparently unable to handle the risky promises of modernity and the seductive materiality of aspirational urbanism (Ren, Reference Ren2017). However, these measures also evidenced rather forcefully the ambivalent relationship between doctrinal laws of the road and how these laws are lived in everyday motoring practices. That is, these measures that symbolised and concretised the power of the state also served as confirmation of a popularly circulating cultural theory in the city: that unless enforced materially, and closely monitored by the police, traffic rules remain mere suggestions. In this vein, incidents such as the one involving the Biodiversity Flyover were not exceptional; instead, they reinvigorated a long-standing and historical discourse around rule-following (the motorist was speeding by a large margin) and the role of the state in ensuring rule-compliance (the state’s inability to command obedience to traffic laws). At the same time, these incidents also trouble and problematise emergent tensions around infrastructural aspirations (the flyover is part of the city’s “world-class” aesthetics), the classist and gendered inequities of automobile-centric urban planning (elite male car driver versus non-elite female pedestrian),Footnote 3 and the culpability of speed (its risks, its aesthetics, and its seductions). These incidents insist, as legal scholars have noted, that the force of law is not just doctrinal and statutory, but social, spatial, and intensely material (McGee, Reference McGee2015; Philippopoulous-Mihalopoulos, Reference Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos2014).
In this paper, I trace the social life of law as it shapes—and is shaped by—quotidian motoring practices in urban India. While laws, rules, and codes that regulate humans and vehicles have been in place in the country since 1914, scholarly attention to how motorists and state actors understand, interpret, and enact these laws is still scant (Arnold, Reference Arnold2012). In the backdrop of a continued public discourse around rule-disobedience, infrastructural aspirations, and class inequality in the city, how does law mediate driving (and riding, henceforth) in the city? In the context of rapid motorisation along with unjust and exclusionary urban development in major Indian cities, how do traffic laws shape—and how are they shaped by—social relations?
Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, this paper seeks to not just analyse how motorists make sense of traffic laws and road rules (with particular focus on speeding) but also to consider how these interpretations orient motorists vis-à-vis the everyday state and the city. That is, how does legal consciousness shape and structure roads in the Indian city? (see Chua and Engel, Reference Chua and Engel2019). As Sarah Masurek observes, “the asphalted roadscape is a place in which governance, compliance, and resistance enliven the understandings and practices of law that we routinely perpetuate, yet challenge every time we drive down the road” (Masusek, Reference Marusek2022, p. vii). Following this cue, on one level, this paper triangulates law, the state, and motorists to probe the material and affective dimensions of driving in the Indian city. On a deeper level, I take the particular case of speeding to demonstrate how and why the governance of mobile bodies in Hyderabad is implicated in longer and broader conversations about national identity, state authority, and class relations. Speed, I posit, becomes an interesting object of study due to it being an aspirational experience, a thrill, a source of road risk, and a matter of legal scrutiny all at once. Further, that speeding is the leading cause of reported road deaths in India is one indicator that speaks to the urgency of studying speed as a motoring practice (Biswas, Reference Biswas2025). As I show in this paper, however, the law is but one of the many urban mediations that organise different social classes, mobilities, and experiences of speed.
2. Data and methods
In this paper, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork that was conducted in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad in episodic stints between 2017 and 2022, supplemented by sporadic follow-up fieldwork in 2024. Based on semi-structured interviews, ride-along observations, field notes, and interpretive analysis of news media, my fieldwork was oriented towards understanding how Hyderabadi motorists interpreted risk, safety, and pleasure in the context of state-led interventions around road safety. In other words, I was curious to understand the material, infrastructural, social, and legal conditions of driving in the city while also analysing state efforts at disciplining drivers and enforcing order on the roads. I conducted interviews (average length of an hour) with around 50 motorists in the city, of which half were drivers of cabs and autorickshaws. To get at a more embodied understanding of motoring in the city, I learned to drive a car at a driving school and went on motorbike and car rides with willing participants, making copious notes afterwards. Methodologically, ride-along interviews provided an organic habitat for conversation about traffic and driving while being on the move (Lynch, Reference Lynch2024; Anjaria, Reference Anjaria2024). In this paper, I draw on 30 such ride-alongs during which I would ask drivers or riders specific questions about observable phenomena on the road, interactions with cops, their views on infrastructural changes, their thoughts on specific rules and laws, and so on, as they drove. Since it was harder to have conversations with two-wheeler riders on the bike, I conducted mostly off-road interviews with them while I let myself simply observe their navigations as a pillion rider.
I supplemented this perspective with observations and interviews with traffic law enforcement agents in the city, namely, the traffic police. I interviewed 15 street-level traffic police officials (constables, sub-inspectors, inspectors), three active police bureaucrats, and two retired police bureaucrats, who served senior managerial-level positions in the traffic police departments. A large part of my ethnographic data also emerged from observations with traffic police as they conducted law enforcement on the streets in four neighbourhoods in the city, as well as observation-based field notes at: four traffic police stations, two traffic training institutes, where counselling sessions were regularly held, police training workshops at the SVP National Police Academy in Hyderabad, and the Institute of Road Traffic Education in New Delhi. I also kept track of news and social media through my interlocutors’ WhatsApp forwards and social media posts. I analysed these media materials interpretively based on my own understanding of the content and complemented that by asking my interlocutors what they thought about a specific video or meme or news report.
As a “native” ethnographer, I conducted fieldwork in a haphazard mix of Telugu, Hindi, Dakhni, and English—the four dominant languages spoken in this region—and enrolled participants through a mixture of snowball sampling and by leveraging my personal networks in the city. My gender and class location, my upper-caste privilege, along with my status as a US-based researcher, enabled the kind of access that made fieldwork possible and shaped how my interlocutors perceived me. I foreground the fact that ethnographic research is a product of the ethnographer’s social positionality, structural conditions of academic research, and the personal and professional journeys that transpire during long-term projects (Kanagasabai, Reference Kanagasabai2023; Günel and Watanabe, Reference Günel and Watanabe2024). I view this not as a “limitation” but as a mode of knowledge-production that insists on the partiality and contingency of research.
3. Traffic, law, and the nation-state
Roads have been discussed and studied by social scientists in terms of their role in projects of modernism, nation-building, state power, elite aspirations, automobility supremacy, utopias of globality and futurism, and even electoral politics (Harvey and Knox, Reference Harvey and Knox2015; Dalakoglou and Harvey, Reference Dalakoglou and Harvey2012; Reeves, Reference Reeves2017; Mostowlansky, Reference Mostowlansky2017; Dalakoglou, Reference Dalakoglou2012; Anand, Reference Anand2006; Harris, Reference Harris2013; Harris, Reference Harris2018; Gopakumar, Reference Gopakumar2020). In this vein, Dalakoglou and Harvey argue that roads are resolutely ideological and affective projects as they “elicit powerful temporal imaginaries, holding out the promise (or threat) of future connectivity, while also articulating the political and material histories that often render these otherwise mundane spaces so controversial” (Dalakoglou and Harvey, Reference Dalakoglou and Harvey2012, p. 460). Similarly, in her work, Ateya Khorakiwala focuses on the aesthetic and sensorial dimensions of roadbuilding and their relationship to postcolonial fantasies of development and progress. Taking a material and semiotic approach to the history of road construction in postcolonial India that modernised with the arrival of bitumen, she writes that, “the carpet-like quality of the bituminous road surface promised a material and experiential condition central to the imagination of modernity: smoothness” (Khorakiwala, Reference Khorakiwala2023, p. 68). The politics of “infrastructural hope” (Reeves, Reference Reeves2017) and “enchantment” (Harvey and Knox, Reference Harvey and Knox2015) that fuels national and transnational discourses on roads also implicitly idolise (and ideologise, for better or worse) the seductiveness of speed, and the iconicity of modernity and progress that new road infrastructures have come to symbolise.
In a different vein, scholars of cities in the Global South have also noted that the proliferation of public-private investment into mega road projects, flyovers, and expressways has been analysed through a political-economic perspective as a “worlding” technique (Roy and Ong, Reference Roy and Ong2011), as an outcome of middle-class and elite involvement—often reproducing urban fragmentation, enclavisation, and infrastructural inequalities (Harris, Reference Harris2013; Gopakumar, Reference Gopakumar2020; Graham, Reference Graham2018; Haque, Reference Haque2024). Here, the focus has remained on how class fault lines are deepened through road infrastructures that serve a motorised public that is relatively more privileged than the urban poor that are the majority denizens. In contexts like India where rampant motorisation and haphazard urban development have produced highly dense, chaotic, polluting, and lethal roads, the materiality of movement and its effects on deepening social divisions and classed hierarchies in the city becomes a key modality of urban politics (Annavarapu, Reference Annavarapu2026; Gopakumar, Reference Gopakumar2020; Anjaria, Reference Anjaria2024).
Despite this plethora of literature on the symbolism, materiality, ideology, and inequity of road infrastructures, we know little about how law shapes—and is shaped by—the materialities of, and movements on, roads. That is, while the literature is instructive in teasing out the power and politics of infrastructural production, what it does not adequately address is how movements on the road are experienced and sensed by motorists or how they are regulated and governed by the state—and by law, specifically. How are the roads that constitute “world class” aspirations—smooth, seamless, expansive—structuring motoring dispositions in the city? This line of inquiry becomes particularly important in unpacking the social life of law on Indian roads since driving is a tightly regulated activity; from registering a vehicle to obtaining a driving licence to stopping at a red light, driving requires (in theory) a compliance with law. As Sarah Seo (Reference Seo2019) notes in her work on policing and automobility in the United States, increasing motorisation proportionately increases interactions with the law due to automobility being a highly regulated sphere of everyday activity that is intimately dependent on the state as a provider of infrastructure and a regulatory force of authority—contra, perhaps, its image or narrative as associated with freedom, independence, and autonomy (also see Rajan, Reference Rajan1996). In fact, the road and driving as an embodied practice are tightly regulated and implicated in laws, rules, and regulations to such an absolute degree that might result in one, as legal scholar Andreas Philippopoulous-Mihalopoulos put it, “feeling surrounded (while at the same time embodying) a net of traffic regulations” (Philippopoulous-Mihalopoulos, Reference Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos2020).
In my own research in Hyderabad, both motorists and state officials would insist to me that the traffic police (the arm of the police tasked with traffic law enforcement specifically) are the embodied manifestations of state power and authority that “the public” interacts with the most in everyday life. Street-level traffic police personnel, in that sense, become the most visible and public face of the state, theoretically performing a dual function of enabling smooth flow of traffic (in that sense, making infrastructures work) as well as disciplining driving behaviour (in that sense, enforcing order—for aesthetic and biopolitical purposes). This heightened presence, visibility, and interactivity with traffic law-enforcement agents provide a methodologically ripe window into examining state-citizen relations. The “visible” manifestations of traffic law in the form of a traffic cop—who, in theory, enacts and implements invisible laws—are further buttressed by other visible and visceral forms of authority, such as speed bumps, dividers or medians, sidewalks, and even the paved road (Masusek, Reference Marusek2022). As Kyle McGee argues, these material artefacts “make us act in specific ways…and so exercise a certain kind of normativity” (McGee, Reference McGee2015, p. 480).
But how and why the law is understood, navigated, and even subverted is linked, I argue, to questions of state legitimacy and authority: how is the state seen? That motorcycles often drive on sidewalks meant for pedestrians, or that traffic police are often involved in acts of petty bribery are occurrences that insist on a closer analysis. Everyday theories of the state, I contend, are drawn from the mundane act of driving. In making this claim, I draw on political anthropologists who have considered driving (and riding, henceforth) as generative of politics. That is, driving as a deeply embodied practice is more than just about transportation; it also offers a window into understanding how the state is experienced, interpreted, and resisted in daily life. Writing about Palestinians driving in occupied West Bank, Amahl Bishara (Reference Bishara2015) shows how the road system is an everyday site where its users come in contact with the work of the state, and, therefore, driving becomes a window through which one can examine popular conceptions of politics. As Bishara puts it, “[T]he road is a place for ranging analysis: informal, inconclusive, sharp, creative” (Bishara, Reference Bishara2015, p. 48). It is on the road that the citizen confronts the most visible manifestation of state power and disciplinary authority—the traffic policeman—and yet, it is on the road, too, that citizens interpret and evaluate some of the fundamental questions of the state, such as, “Is the state is able to provide services like safe, easy, comfortable and efficient modes of mobility?”
Similarly, Kristin Monroe demonstrates how fowda (chaos) on the road becomes the material and metaphorical route through which motorists in Beirut make sense of the national identity but also the capacity, legitimacy, and the authority of state in everyday life (Monroe, Reference Monroe2016). Tracing the emergence of support for authoritarian populism, Marco Garrido notes how unruly traffic in Manila comes to be interpreted by elite and middle-class citizens as socio-political disorder in general and creates the conditions of desires for heavy-handed governance (Garrido, Reference Garrido2021). In these accounts, amongst others, what emerges is a methodological and conceptual approach that takes driving as a vibrant site of everyday activity where popular understandings of the state are reproduced and institutionalised (also see Melly, Reference Melly2017).
4. Driving in the city
A key part of this approach is analytical attention to how the law—as an idea and a concept in general—structures motoring subjectivities in the city. For instance, a popular phrase that circulates with ease in Hyderabad is “if you can drive in Hyderabad, you can drive anywhere in the world.” Always delivered with a bit of laughter and a sense of resignation, this simple sentence comes to index a multitude of subtexts. Motorists, upon pressing them further about this phrase, would talk about how navigating lawless driving, chaotic traffic, corrupt traffic cops, and bad road infrastructure supposedly prepares one for all driving challenges in the world. The embodied experiences on the road, as I argue elsewhere, not only create conditions for the articulations of tough masculinity (Annavarapu, Reference Annavarapu2024) but also become the basis for motorists to make claims on the state and challenge the legitimacy of punitive road safety policies (Annavarapu, Reference Annavarapu2026). For instance, a national-level law that sought to increase traffic fines was passed by the Indian Parliament in 2019 after years of lobbying by road safety advocacy groups who called for higher fines that could act as deterrents to traffic law infringement. However, as soon as these amendments to the Motor Vehicle Act (1988) were passed in the form of the Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act (2019), there were organised protests all over the country. These protests were united in pointing out how pecuniary punishment is classist and that increased fines would enable more bribery amongst street-level officials rather than deter traffic law infringements.
Another line of opposition pointed to the continued bribery and corruption at the juncture of driving licence issuance in the country—questioning the moral authority of the state to penalise motorists while driving licences are “for sale.”Footnote 4 However, perhaps the most voluble pushback came through a focus on infrastructural provisions and how the state has failed in providing safe and convenient infrastructures. As one viral tweet from that time succinctly (and problematically) commented, “one cannot levy Scandinavian-level fines for African-level infrastructure,” thereby getting at the question of whether these new fines are justified. On both counts, what became public conversation was the corruption of the state: either at the hands of the everyday street-level cop or at the hands of the invisible chains of corruption that culminates in substandard road infrastructures. The unruliness of the state is called to attention. As anthropologists of the state have long argued, the “illegibility” of the state manifests in its capacity to operate beyond the reach of its own laws and structures, creating a space of contingency and ambiguity (Das, Reference Das2006; Gupta, Reference Gupta2012; Hoag, Reference Hoag2010).
Furthermore, the issue of traffic congestion and the bottleneck as a failure of the state came up time and again particularly in relation to discussions of speeding. Even though speeding is the leading cause of deaths in the country, few of my interlocutors found it to be an issue in cities. Barring a few road safety enthusiasts in the city, few were aware of speed limits on various city roads and were not quite sure whether they had seen or thought about the speed limit signages on city roads. Some pointed to the lack of the visibility of these signages and some others pointed to the visual pollution of roads in general where a variety of posters, political banners, and advertisements took visual precedence over traffic signages. But the predominant framing of the speeding narrative was less about the legal and technical awareness of speeding laws and more a phenomenological comment on infrastructural issues in the country. For example, Nitin, an IT worker in his 30s who used to ride a motorcycle but now drives an SUV due to spinal issues which he claims were exacerbated by the potholed roads of Hyderabad, insisted that “speeding is not an issue in Indian cities because there isn’t much scope for it due to the mad traffic in which we are moving at snail’s pace!” Similarly, Priya, a homemaker in her 30s who drives a car, said that speeding should be controlled at night or on highways and expressways because, “as it is traffic is so slow in our cities that I am sure nobody even has the chance to go above speed limits.” Anecdotally too, this is hardly true since the Volkswagen accident that I started this paper with happened during the afternoon hours on a city road. However, these narratives around slowness exist and often are leveraged to make sense of speeding as an “infrastructural aptitude” to congestion (Lee, Reference Lee2015) or as a way of accommodating and coping with the material conditions of driving in the city (Bedi, Reference Bedi2023).
This rationale can also be found in a general reluctance to wear seatbelts in the city. Rakesh, in his late 20s, was one of the many cab drivers I noticed who hacked the seatbelt sensor-and-alarm system (due to which the car beeps till you wear the seatbelt) by simply buckling the belt behind their back—such that the sensor is satiated but the belt does not go over their body. I often asked cab drivers why they did that instead of just wearing the belt as it is meant for their safety, to which I got similar responses. I provide Rakesh’s here as an example:
I drive all day and wearing it [seatbelt] all day is very uncomfortable. What is the point of this seatbelt anyway? We barely get the chance to go so fast! The city roads are so full of traffic. Yes, sometimes one gets to speed a little on some roads but that is very rare. I always wear the seatbelt when we go on ORR [Outer Ring Road] or on outstation trips. The traffic is so slow otherwise that I feel like we don’t need to bother on city roads. (Field Notes, 2022)
One could argue that Rakesh is simply making excuses or that his gripe with the road traffic is too trivial to warrant not taking seatbelts seriously. But this was no trivial gripe, and neither was it uncommon to hear this pushback. The density and congestion of roads produced embodied reactions, resentments, and rationalisations amongst driver-workers who spent most of their time on the roads (Chowdhury, Reference Chowdhury2023). These also formed the basis of why drivers sped when they could. In several conversations with drivers like Rakesh, the need to make up time lost to traffic congestion became one of the main reasons drivers felt the need to speed. In these ways, the material conditions of driving and road traffic laid the basis for how motorists made sense of speeding—not as a legal category but as an affective, experiential, and infrastructural practice that could not be made sense of on abstract terms (Pilo’ and Jaffe, Reference Pilo’ and Jaffe2020). These material conditions also determine, as I will now proceed to discuss, both the policing of speeding as an everyday urban practice and the fault lines of class power through which urban roads are claimed as well as navigated.
5. Governing speed: class matters
Amongst the several traffic violations that constitute Hyderabadi roads, “over-speeding” or speeding tends to attract the greatest number of traffic tickets. One reason for this is that the technologies of detecting speeding enable the quick issuance of tickets for the same. However, broadly speaking, speed—and its hazardous repercussions—has been the object of disciplining and governance since the arrival of the automobile. Social scientific research has long noted the “decivilizing” potentials of the motorisation (Elias, Reference Elias1995) and more recent work has pushed the car to be studied not just as a socio-technical assemblage or a consumerist fantasy but also as a criminological object (Loader, Reference Loader2025; Jain, Reference Jain2004).Footnote 5 Within these discussions, there have also been instructive analyses of how speeding as a source of risk and danger on the roads has shaped technologies of governance, masculine identities, class relations, and infrastructural solutionism (Lamont, Reference Lamont2013; Menoret, Reference Menoret2014). For my interlocutors in the traffic police department, speed was associated with risky pleasure, and speeding was the hardest driving activity to monitor, control, and enforce. While most of the city roads were often thought to be too congested for speeding, it was the expressways, flyovers, and the Outer Ring Road that were known to be hotspots for fatalities owing to uncontrolled speed. At the same time, city roads too turned into racing corridors—particularly at night when the roads were emptier and intersected with other risky pleasures such as driving under the influence of alcohol.Footnote 6
As with the general approach towards encouraging rule-following and law-obedience, the traffic police’s attempts at governing speed have been along three lines: punitive (in the form of traffic tickets and penalties); physical (speed bumps, rumble strips, loudspeakers announcing the speed limit, speed governors); and pedagogical (counselling and awareness programmes). Together, the idea is that these modes will produce law-abiding citizens who follow traffic rules on the road. The constitution of an infrastructural disposition that can accommodate the changing urban landscape and increased motorisation while adopting a disposition to the state that is reverential and obedient—that was the two-fold goal of the punitive and pedagogical programmes put in place by the traffic police. But in the face of little trust in the state at large and the wider experience of police authority as being provisional (Jauregui, Reference Jauregui2016) rather than absolute, these desires of state officers were constituted and upended by internal contradictions. I now demonstrate this point in the sections below with a particular focus on speeding. I discuss below only the punitive and physical modes of governance to reveal a set of contradictions that capture the frictions between the desires for modernity and the material conditions of life in the city that shape the social life of law on the ground.
5.1. Governance by tickets (punitive)
Traffic tickets (called “challans”) for speeding, in particular, are generated largely outside the city limits where laser speed guns are installed along the roads and they produce traffic tickets automatically. The city police publish data about the number of tickets being generated for speeding—popularised via news media—in a bid not only to raise awareness about the problem of speeding but also to project the traffic police department as modernising through technological developments. When I was doing fieldwork, these modes of conducting “non-contact enforcement” of traffic rules were shown to me with much pride by the traffic officers. These laser guns would make enforcing speeding laws quicker, and more seamless, I was told repeatedly. However, many of the motorists I spoke to read these numbers as obscuring how the traffic police have been inept at making people pay these tickets. While more and more tickets keep getting issued, the ability to make people pay still rests on “contact enforcement” whereby cops stop vehicles during random checks on the road and then make them pay their pending tickets. For instance, according to a news article, while traffic tickets worth Rs 12,000 crore were issued in the country, Rs 9,000 crore worth of tickets remain unpaid (PTI, 2025). A report in The Hindu suggests that 75% of the traffic tickets that are issued in the urban agglomerate of Hyderabad, Cyberabad, and Rachakonda were unpaid as of November 2025 (Kumar and Kaur, Reference Kumar and Kaur2025). That is, out of 12.8 million tickets issued, 9.9 million remain unpaid. The journalists termed this an “unprecedented compliance crisis,” which speaks to how, while the issuance of traffic tickets has increased due to the modernisation of technology, the recovery of traffic tickets rests on older technologies like checkpoints. A traffic police interlocutor in Hyderabad told me that the police too recognise how making people pay up in accordance with the law is still contingent on tracking these vehicles and their owners down on the roads or offering discounts to incentivise payments (see Kumar and Kaur, Reference Kumar and Kaur2025).
The speed of issuing tickets culminates in the physical stoppage of people and vehicles on the road for the law to take force. As Kyle McGee argues with reference to the materiality of law, the force of law and its capacity to shape social action depend on a set of socio-technical assemblages through which the law acts upon bodies (McGee, Reference McGee2015). In this case, the digital technologies of traffic enforcement have to intersect with the infrastructure of policing in the country for there to be the kind of desired effect in terms of rule-compliance. In the absence of state capacity to enact enforcement, the tickets accumulate via digital means but their punitive function emerges upon a physical encounter with the police.
More generally, it could be argued that the pecuniary mode of governance is classist in nature in that it makes rule-compliance dependent on one’s ability to pay. One of the reasons, my police interlocutors argued, that people do not pay the tickets is that they simply cannot afford to at the time, which is particularly true of motorists of lower classes. One might argue that this would create conditions for deterrence. In practice, however, policing in India is often caught up in political complications; that is, historically, no political party has been keen on enforcing traffic rules to a point that it would reflect negatively during elections. In Hyderabad, there is a history of traffic penalties being caught up in political calculations with the most memorable incident (that was brought up often during fieldwork) being the time that Marri Channa Reddy campaigned in 1989 by promising a relaxation of traffic laws, particularly the helmet law (see Ali, Reference Ali2016; Buddi, Reference Buddi2012). More recently, when the national-level legislation on increased traffic fines was passed, the Chief Ministers of several states refused to implement them in their states in order to appease their electorates. The Chief Minister of Telangana himself declared that he would not “harass” citizens through increased fines. In one swift sentence, laws meant to deter rule-disobedience were framed as “harassment” (India Today, 2019).
Keeping this material and political context in mind, the Hyderabad Traffic Police came up with a different solution during and after the COVID-19 pandemic: offering discounts on pending traffic tickets to ensure that more motorists cleared their pending tickets on their own (The Hindu Bureau, 2023). This is one example of an obvious chasm between the law on paper and the law as it is enacted and navigated. The other is that periodically, news outlets point to how government-owned vehicles themselves do not seem to be paying up traffic tickets. For example, a 2025 article in The Hindu noted that buses run by the State Road Transport Corporation have fines over Rs 1 crore (USD 112,000) pending and that only 121 out of 5,790 traffic tickets have been cleared by the transport corporation (Mohammed, Reference Mohammed2025). Similarly, in 2022, an article in Deccan Chronicle noted how a police-owned SUV had over six traffic tickets stacked up against it with none having been cleared (Deepak, Reference Deepak2022). Even though these figures are for the state of Telangana and not just the city of Hyderabad, they point to the gaps and fissures that emerge as the law circulates from the texts to bodies in motion; and, thus, they also nudge law-enforcement agents to consider alternative ways of eliciting rule-obedience.
5.2. Governance by bumps
During the time I spent with traffic police officers, I observed how eager they were to resort to material and infrastructural changes in their efforts to regulate driver behaviour—often preferring them far and above punitive measures. The placement of medians, barricades, and other physical and material adjustments for guiding traffic were often put forward to senior officers as the only effective strategies for making people follow rules—especially since they felt that their efforts to either raise awareness or increase enforcement were not quite bringing the desired behavioural outcomes, and were quite classist in their implications. Bascom Guffin has examined precisely how traffic police authorities and urban planners in Hyderabad imagine a utopia of technological determinism by relying on material changes to the way roads are experienced in the city (Guffin, Reference Guffin2015). Roads instruct slowness and command an automatic obedience to speeding laws when drivers modify their behaviour in direct response to the mediation of speed bumps (Latour, Reference Latour, Bijker and Law1992; see also McGee, Reference McGee2015).
However, in June 2017, the central government acknowledged a more subterranean knowledge that speed bumps also “caused” deaths and injuries. In response to a parliamentary question that raised the issue of speed bumps, the minister of state in the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways released a public circular in which it was declared that more than 11,000 crashes were caused by speed bumps in both 2014 and 2015. Due to these crashes, in each of these years, around 3,000 people had died, and more than 9,000 people had been injured. Upon the release of this report, newspapers all over the country carried headlines such as, “Speed Breakers Kill: They Cause 30 Crashes and 9 Deaths a Day” or “Speed Breakers in India Kill More People than Accidents Do in UK, Australia.”
Speed bumps—it is common knowledge—are meant to regulate the speed of drivers for the sake of safety. Keeping that in mind, that these regulatory devices are causing deaths and injuries might seem like a strange idea. But what was being discussed in these news reports and social media was how the speed bumps were themselves in violation of engineering codes. An infrastructural artefact that was meant to make people conform to one law (not speeding) is, in this case, built in violation of several other laws that govern movement. As per Indian Roads Congress 1988, speed bumps should be 3.7 metres wide and 10 centimetres high with a 17-metre radius hump, designed for 25 kmph speeds, and marked with reflective thermoplastic paint and warning signs placed in advance. The speed bumps surveyed by local media outlets were dangerous not because they were speed bumps, but because they were either too high/steep, not accompanied by any warning or cautionary signs, or not marked by appropriate road markings (Devulapalli, Reference Devulapalli2016). In Hyderabad, journalists had begun to report on the ubiquity of unlawful speed bumps all over the city. One such case that I went over to check was the existence of 22 unmarked speed bumps on a 2-km-long (1.2-mile-long) road in the AC Guards area. While the presence of 22 speed bumps on a 2-km road was an extreme case, it was not uncommon to see many speed bumps even in residential neighbourhoods. To date, newspaper reports are rife with discussions of recurring, relentless speed bumps all over the city. The issue with most of these speed bumps is not just their quantity, but also the fact that these speed bumps are constructed hastily and in violation of the engineering codes recommended by the Indian Roads Congress in 1988.
In 2019, I lived on Picket Road for three months and personally bore witness to how jarring a ride on a bike could be when a 1-km (0.6-mile) stretch of road had eight speed bumps. None of these speed bumps were marked, they seemed intuitively too steep for two-wheelers, and nor were there any road markings announcing the speed bump. Particularly at night, there were factors compounding these dangers, such as there not being enough streetlights on some roads. Several news reports found that the concerned state authorities were flouting the procedures that supposedly needed to be followed to get a speed bump sanctioned on any road. Instead, residents of local colonies were often pooling their own money and either building speed bumps using their own materials or getting local traffic police staff or local civic bodies to build the speed bumps. According to the founder of a local NGO focused on road safety, residents often bribe authorities to get speed bumps constructed in their neighbourhoods, to circumvent the long-winded process of obtaining the required approvals and permissions to get speed bumps constructed on roads. An investigation by The Hindu similarly revealed that even urban civic officials themselves were unsure of the procedures for building lawful speed bumps in the city (Devulapalli, Reference Devulapalli2016).
While a car driver might find the experience unpleasant and while there might be damage to the car chassis, for riders of two-wheeled vehicles, the risk is often bodily injury and fatality. Without adequate signage, marking, and lighting, the infrastructural artefact that is meant to be the manifestation of state authority and a guarantor of safety is experienced as both illegitimate and dangerous. The bumpiness which is uncomfortable or economically draining for one set of motorists—car drivers—is more entirely a source of discomfort and danger for riders of two-wheelers. Since around 80% of Hyderabadi traffic is comprised of two-wheelers, any measure that increases bodily discomfort on the road and results in jerks and jolts to the body has an effect counter to the intention behind these bumps. Here too, class comes to matter through a sensory lens: who can feel the road more intimately often depends on the physicality, build, and suspension of the vehicle. That high-end SUVs are less likely to be vulnerable to steep speed bumps in the same way as a cyclist is an example of how the materiality of movement cleaves road traffic across social hierarchies.
6. Elite entitlement: beyond the event to the everyday
On WhatsApp groups and Reddit forums that I was part of, the Biodiversity Flyover incident revealed and amplified the long-standing simmering tensions around the effects of class and power on Indian roads in a different manner than what we have been discussing until now. In his work on road accidents and urban dystopia in New Delhi, Ravi Sundaram (Reference Sundaram2009) theorises the “wound culture” as public cultural sense of being overwhelmed on and by the road, such that “divisions between private trauma and public tragedy blurred, suggesting a traumatic collapse between inner worlds and the shock of public encounters” (Sundaram, Reference Sundaram2009, pp. 170–1). That the woman who died was waiting under the flyover for an autorickshaw and the man driving above was a wealthy businessman driving an expensive car made for a story about roads, mobility, and rights that is far too intimately familiar to Indian citizens: the rich car-owning elite is a source of danger to vulnerable road users such as pedestrians, bikers, motorcyclists, and so on.Footnote 7 Further, in the words of a reviewer of this paper, “more and more over the 1990s, anyone who is ‘still’ a pedestrian in this chronically underfunded road system is chastised from the body politic.” For instance, Mrinalini, a woman in her early 30s, shared on a WhatsApp group I was part of:
This is not the first time that rich people treat our roads like their personal property. They do whatever they want in their fancy cars – and innocent people, poor people, pedestrians bear the brunt of these people. I agree that speed is the culprit, but it is rich people who have no care for anyone else that are the real culprits. But they will go scot-free, as they always do in this country. (2019, shared with permission)
Mrinalini was the driver of a two-wheeler and taught at a local school. A member of the middle-class, her embodied scepticism was based on a public secret in India: how rich you are determines whether you face any consequences for road crashes. Very often, high-profile cases were referenced to me as evidence of the impotence of the law in the face of political, economic, and celebrity power.Footnote 8 While several such cases exist in the country, the Biodiversity Flyover case became emblematic of elite privilege in local discourse. Several headlines referred to the car driver, Milan Rao, as a “businessman” or “entrepreneur” or even “CEO” as a proxy for the class hierarchies in this incident. For example, the Deccan Chronicle (2019) carried a headline the day after this incident that stated, “Speeding CEO kills woman, injures four.” The identity of the driver went beyond his motoring positionality as a car driver to indicate his status in the city as a white-collar and elite man. Furthermore, rumours circulated that the car driver was not just income-rich but also a distant relative of the then Chief Minister. In other words, he was politically “connected.” While the rumour was never substantiated, it held a strong sway in public imagination—more so than the legal details of the case.Footnote 9
For several of my interlocutors, the ongoing impasse became a clear example of the bottleneck that the legal system in India tends to become (Oommen, Reference Oommen2022). The conversation went beyond the confines of the accident as an event and opened more long-standing observations, mundane around speed—on and off the roads. Caroline Melly in her work in Senegal observes how the metaphor and materiality of “the bottleneck” becomes the mode through which both traffic and governance are made sense of by state officials and citizens (Melly, Reference Melly2017). Similarly, speed here operated on many levels: a metaphor, a promise, an aspiration, and also a betrayal. In a direct reference to this disjuncture, Mehboob, a driver for an app-based cab company, said to me:
Hyderabad has become flyover city. There are big roads, wide roads, smooth roads also. Expressways, ring roads, what not. It is all part of development. After all, India is also trying to catch up on the world’s stage. But these same roads are also the site of many horrible accidents. And the claims for these accidents, the cases around these accidents, they take very long. However big and shiny these roads become, the courts and the corrupt institutions remain the same… It is very funny: speed on the roads, but no speed when it comes to justice! (Field Notes, 2018)
In similar conversations with motorists about the slowness of the legal systems that purportedly provide justice, what became clear to me was that the promise of modernity offered by the aesthetic and sensory dimensions of roads and the possibility of speed was counteracted by the lack of speedy justice. The elites, as Mehboob and others would continue to emphasise, could get away with murder.
But Mehboob went further and took a more mundane experience from his everyday life to impress upon me the several injustices of speed that are caught up in violences which go beyond that of the road. The material conditions of his work—which are shaped by class and caste relations in India—shaped the very compulsions and consequences of speeding. On the particular conundrums about speeding that he faces as a driver under platform capitalism, he said:
A few years back, I had customers who will book a cab from this Lanco Hills or My Home Bhooja or some such posh community. Some early morning flight they need to take and of course they’ll be late. Then while I am driving, they will keep telling me to “Go fast! Go fast! I will miss my flight!” In India as it is people treat drivers with utmost disrespect. And, you know, a couple of times because of these people I got fined! Police have installed these laser guns to detect speeding on Outer Ring Road. And I got a 1,000-rupee ticket! I complained to Uber later and obviously Uber blamed me: why did you go fast? I did not get any compensation. Had I not gone fast, the customers would have complained or given me bad ratings. What is one to do? (Field Notes, 2018)
Owing to a Supreme Court order, since 2017, cabs like Mehboob’s ought to be fitted with a Speed Limiting Device (SLD) or a “speed governor” which would prohibit them from going over 80 kmph. Sellers are required to install an SLD in the cab being purchased with the additional cost of Rs 10,000 borne by the buyer. Some drivers like Mehboob who had their cabs purchased prior to this rule coming into force, did not purchase a speed governor immediately. He told me that he would buy one when they really started enforcing that rule retrospectively, but for now he had a hack. Winking at me, he said, “After that speeding ticket, I decided that I will just tell my customers that I have a speed governor installed and that is why I cannot go above 80 kmph. Who will check?”
As a driver for a company which works on a gig economy model of work, Mehboob was like several other drivers I came across who were cast as “micro-entrepreneurs.” This framing, despite its aspirational gloss, rests on the understanding that this is a customer-centric model of business, and the risks of the job are borne by the drivers alone (De Neve et al., Reference De Neve, Medappa and Prentice2023; Ray, Reference Ray2024). But Mehboob’s example also impresses upon Sarah Sharma’s point that acceleration—of which speed is constitutive—is a relational process (Sharma, Reference Sharma2014). That taxi drivers and their temporal labours are often linked to the demands of a different set of classed bodies; for an IT worker to get to the airport on time, cab drivers bear the risk of a speeding ticket. Further, Mehboob’s position of being a driver and having to alter his speed to suit his customer’s demands has to be read in the context of deeply entrenched caste-class hierarchies and social antagonisms that constitute driving labour in general (Amrute, Reference Amrute2015; Govinda, Reference Govinda2020) but also under the conditions of platform capitalism (Annavarapu, Reference Annavarapu2022; Mazumdar, Reference Mazumdar2025).
Yet Mehboob was not passive by any means. Commenting on how there is no legislation that regulates the employment of gig workers like him but that there is a lot of legislation that regulates driving, he joked aloud that these laser speed guns that the police deploy should be capable of finding out why people are speeding: is it necessity, pressure, or simply elite entitlement of irate passengers? He and I both knew that the only afterlife of his speeding journeys would be a category created by state bureaucracy which declares that one is “driving/riding over the speed limit.” This is also not to say that drivers do not speed because they want to. That would also be an unfair portrayal of cab drivers, as if they are devoid of agentic decision-making. Several cab drivers I spoke to did allude to the compulsions they faced in terms of financial incentives for making more rides happen or to the desires they held in terms of simply maximising their earnings for the day. Some others more directly spoke of how they like to speed because it is pleasurable, it becomes a conduit to perform hypermasculinity, and that they are willing to take the risks because they trust their own driving expertise. But my point is that speeding, its intertwining with conditions of work, and the class/caste worlds it shapes need more by way of empirical research, especially since gig work in Indian cities is premised upon “quick” and “fast” transport and delivery (Hussain, Reference Hussain2023; Singh et al., Reference Singh, Garcia and Lindtner2023).
The links between labour and class/caste structures need more urgent examination to unpack the conditions, compulsions, and consequences of speeding. This becomes apparent in the ongoing safety issues faced by app-based delivery riders in urban India. For instance, as of August 2024, 9 delivery riders had been killed and around 30 injured due to traffic accidents that were linked to these demands of “ten-minute” grocery deliveries and so on. According to the Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union, there are about 60,000 to 65,000 bikes attached with different food aggregators, rental bikes, and other e-commerce apps, and 70% of them have multiple tickets of thousands of rupees. Each agent would be facing multiple challans, mostly food delivery executives who violate the traffic rules to deliver the food parcel within the time limit as set by the aggregator companies (Farooqui, Reference Farooqui2023). In a meeting with delivery platforms in January 2025, the Joint Commissioner of Traffic in Cyberabad asked app-based businesses (such as Rapido, Zepto, Ola, Uber, Instamart) to conduct road safety sensitisation programmes. There was no mention of the fact that the very structure and premise of the gig economy model which promises instant delivery might have something to do with the tendency to speed (and break other traffic rules). In the words of Zafar, a delivery worker for Instamart:
“These companies fall outside the framework of labour laws in their insistence on instant this and instant that – but we are expected to follow traffic laws while facing the everyday realities of riding through intense traffic and on bad roads. Speed will kill you or slowness will starve you: this is the truth of being a gig worker in India today.” (Field Notes, 2024)
Reminiscent of Ravi Sundaram’s observation that “in the conflict between speed culture and the discourses of safety, there are no clear winners as yet” (Sundaram, Reference Sundaram2009, p. 165), Zafar’s words cut to the temporal contradictions that structure the very mobilities that speeding laws gloss over. They also point to the state as an entity whose fragmentation is its very leverage—the regulation of speeding and the regulation of labour are disconnected in law while they are deeply intertwined in the case of these delivery riders. More broadly, motor vehicle laws seemingly have little to do with labour laws, or traffic congestion, or class relations in the city—and yet, how and why motor vehicle laws are navigated, negotiated, and even negated depend on these several factors that give us a fuller glimpse into the materiality of law in everyday urban India.
7. Conclusion
In the context of growing visibility and salience of the motorist as an important and distinct socio-political actor in urban India, analysing the consolidation and crafting of motoring subjectivities remains vital to understanding law and life on the move. In this paper, I have attempted to gather the contradictions and frictions that undergird the governance of roads—and, in particular, speed—in the Indian city. Through these moves, I argue that methodologically, an embodied practice like driving opens up the possibility to triangulate between the state, the law, and the citizen in interesting and productive ways. How do motorists approach the road? How is legal consciousness consolidated through movement? What are the material, sensorial, and infrastructural conditions of motoring—and how do they produce and reproduce perceptions and orientations towards the law and the state?
I show how the logics of governing motoring bodies in urban India are riddled with material and legal contradictions that often complicate the twists and turns that the law takes on the road as a mediator of movement. Through a discussion of the contradictions and paradoxes that constitute the governance of speed in Hyderabad, I argue that the state’s relationship to law and the motorists’ relationship to law are brought into tension when one probes what the apparent source of “unruliness” on the road is and why. The material and infrastructural conditions of driving, I posit, produce situational relationships to the state and, by extension, the law. On the one hand, the kinds of policing mechanisms that the state enacts on the roads in order to curb a practice like speeding intentionally and unintentionally deepen social hierarchies on the road through technological and sensorial modalities. On the other hand, the historical accrual of elite entitlement on Indian roads twinned with the violent appropriation of roads by speeding cars makes for slow mobility justice and speedy betrayals by the state. Finally, I argue that the question of legal infractions is more complicated when one takes a closer look at the caste/class hierarchies and labour conditions that govern the accelerations and decelerations that constitute life in urban India.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my interlocutors in Hyderabad for all their time. My project would be impossible without their generosity. This paper has improved tremendously thanks to the two anonymous reviewers who took time out to review the manuscript and to Manasa Gade for her proofreading prowess. A huge thanks also to Dhiraj Nainani, Orlando Woods, Kah Wee Lee, and Maitrii Victoriano Aung Thwin and all the participants of the Law and Geography in Asia Workshop held at Asia Research Institute who gave critical feedback on an early version of this paper. The fieldwork for this project has been supported by Center for International Social Science Research at the University of Chicago and NUS Start-Up Grant (A-0003377-01-00).
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