This video from 2017 landed up on our recommendations on YouTube and we felt terrified, then proud and highly satisfied after watching them. The YouTube channel – Young Indian North East India posted a video a couple of years ago titled “Mon Nagaland Bus driver rocks World most dangerous Road”. The video shows three bus drivers from the small village of Mon in Nagaland, attempting to drive through a corner in the hilly region. The surface is unpaved and slippery with an off camber downhill, and that combination is would already be terrifying in a car.
But these bus drivers, of course after offloading its passengers, drift their busses through the downhill bend with extremely low traction. The execution of the first two busses is highly commendable, especially the transition drift at the end to avoid the trucks parked on either side. Managing that in small cars is difficult already and doing them in these large heavy coaches requires skills possessed by some drivers like the ones who compete in Dakar and rallies.
As for the third bus, it wasn’t as smooth sailing. In the video, the bus veers off course and drifts closer to the edge, but eventually stops just off the edge of the cliff. While this would be highly terrifying, but the conductor/spotter jumping out in the last moment like ‘abandon ship’ is somewhat hilarious. But thankfully it seems like no one was harmed in the making of the video.
The road on which these drivers have to navigate like this every day is the “National Highway 702” which runs through Nagaland and Assam. It is an offshoot of primary National Highway 2 and is 177kms long and passes through the village of Mon, Nagaland where this video was taken. The video has gathered 853,122 views since it was uploaded with a weirdly apt background score of the UEFA Champions League theme song. The 570 comments on the video mostly praise the drivers of the busses, but some more appropriately are appalled by the government’s lack of imitative to create safer infrastructure in the region, especially being on a national highway. Watch the video and see these drivers in action for yourself.
