When I moved to the UAE three years ago, I had been driving for the best part of a decade in a city where cars compete with cows, pedestrians and potholes. After Mumbai, driving on the UAE’s smooth, signage-heavy roads promised to be a piece of cake. Or so I thought. However, while driver’s licences from many, mainly western countries – even right-hand-drive ones such as Australia and the United Kingdom – are easy to transfer, those from the Indian subcontinent are about as valuable as an exploded tyre at the side of the highway.
Indian licence holders need to follow a labyrinthine procedure involving paperwork, a set number of theory and practical lessons, and separate parking and driving tests, all of which entail multiple visits to the inner recesses of Mussaffah (or Al Quoz and Nadd Al Hamar in Dubai).
Two years after funding seemingly every taxi driver in the UAE, I decided to go for it. Step one was to translate my old driver’s booklet into Arabic – a day-long, Dh100 process at a typing centre. Next, an eye test (Dh30) at the Drivers’ Licensing Department in Mussaffah – you open a file before signing up for theory lessons at the Emirates Driving Institute (EDI) centre. Unfortunately, I forgot my glasses on the day of the eye exam and didn’t stand a chance with that pesky last line.
On trip two, armed with copies of my passport, visa, Emirates ID, translated driver’s licence, eye test and no-objection certificate (NOC) with company letterhead, I reached the academy to find the women’s side bereft of visitors... and staff. I was directed to the packed men’s side, where a policeman checked my papers, but sent me away to get a company stamp on the NOC.
Trip three and Dh300 in cab fares later – this before my file had been opened – I had a letter from my company’s HR department stating it’s not company policy to restamp computer-generated documentation. But just as I was about to about to fish it out, a policewoman opened my file, no questions asked.
On to the EDI centre. Before sitting the theory exam, you have to take eight hours of lessons across four days (Dh300). For Dh1,500, however, you can condense these into a one-day, two-hour class. After memorising 30-plus signs and left-hand-rule diagrams overnight, I scored 45 out of 45 on the test the next afternoon.
Later that week, I signed up for my 20 compulsory practical lessons. It’s then I was told about the “golden chance”: if you have a licence from your home country that’s at least 5 years old, you’re eligible for a one-time test without lessons or reverse/parallel- parking tests. But if, unlike me, you swapped your tatty booklet for the card licence introduced in India less than five years ago, you must take those 20 lessons, plus a parking test before the actual driving test.
I signed up for independent lessons from an EDI-certified driver, at Dh70 an hour. Hopefully, after four or five, I will finally drive myself to the gym... OK, fine, the mall, next month.
pmunyal@thenational.ae
