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MUMBAI -- To much of the outside world, India is a nation brimming over with people. Now add cars to that picture.

A surging economy has delivered higher incomes and easy credit to a growing Indian middle class, making cars affordable to millions of people for the first time.

With cash on hand, Indians are splurging on a new family car, sometimes two, while their sons and daughters spend their wages on $1,000 motorcycles. The number of vehicles on the road has more than tripled to 67 million since 1991, when the first tentative reforms opened the country's closed economy, igniting a consumption boom that is still going strong more than a decade later.

This is good news for India's car-hungry citizens. For decades they chafed under a paternalistic socialism that forced them to wait for upward of 10 years to buy a vehicle; when they finally took delivery, it was usually of the home-grown and hopelessly obsolete Ambassador sedan.

It's also a boon for the local auto industry, and for the people getting jobs with foreign auto makers that are expanding their operations in India.

But when India's millions of new drivers climb into their cars and hit the road, they are confronting the flip side of their newfound prosperity: The country's long-neglected road network is woefully unprepared for the motorized onslaught. Though several massive road-improvement projects are under way, it doesn't appear that the national and local governments are keeping up with the surge in traffic. Red tape, land shortages and budget constraints slow the progress of road work. And alternative public-transportation systems aren't offering enough relief.

With one of the world's fastest-growing economies, India may be a model of the power of economic reform. But its story is also a cautionary tale about the resulting strains on a country's transportation system.

A Measure of Relief

The bustling commercial capital of Mumbai is a microcosm of India's struggle to deal with a deluge of cars. This metropolis of 12 million people is laid out on a north-south axis, with only one major arterial road connecting the business hub in the south with the airports and booming suburbs to the north. There are no major east-west arteries.

The result is traffic mayhem, frayed tempers, and trips across town planned as thoroughly as a military exercise. Cars and trucks jostle with three-wheeled rickshaws and motor scooters on pocked and rutted roads that are dotted with ponds during the monsoon season. "Mumbai's traffic is a nightmare, and its roads are in terrible condition," says P. K. Sikdar, a transportation consultant based in New Delhi.

Every day sees 300 new vehicles registered in Mumbai, according to traffic experts. The number of cars in the city rose to more than one million at last count in 2001, from 309,000 in 1981. It will hit 1.6 million by 2011, says R. Ramana, a senior transportation planner for the city's municipal government.

City planners say the Bandra-Worli Sealink will ease some of the pain. This 3.7-mile bridge will relieve traffic congestion in the Mahim area, between downtown and the airports, by siphoning traffic off the main road, which is roughly parallel. Its builders say it will be completed by 2008. The cost is estimated at $316 million.

The sea link is the most ambitious project under construction in Mumbai, but not the only one. The city's government is laying out two roads across Mumbai as well. Additionally, says Mr. Ramana, nearly $70 million is being spent on massive upgrades to about one-quarter of the city's more than 1,100 miles of roads, including road-widening projects and overpasses at choke points.

Falling Behind

Will it be enough? Any major infrastructure project takes an inordinate amount of time in India, where the best-laid plans often founder on bureaucratic red tape and on difficulty in obtaining land. In typical fashion, the Bandra-Worli Sealink is already three years past its original completion target.

Couple that with rising vehicle numbers, and the new roads may not make as much difference as hoped by the time they are completed.

The Sealink "will provide a huge benefit to motorists," says Sharad Sabnis, a superintending engineer with the Maharashtra State Road Development Corp. who is working on the project. But he recognizes that it won't solve Mumbai's traffic problems. "The city is growing even as we are trying to decongest it," Mr. Sabnis says. "Something has to be done to curb demand for cars."

Efforts along those lines, however, seem similarly inadequate. Indian cities are trying to bolster public transportation. New Delhi's metro system, launched in 2002, carries 2.2 million passengers a day. And the first phase, with 50 stations, was completed on time late last year. The capital's metro is being used as a model for Mumbai's, where construction has started on 26 stations. The government of Maharashtra state has also approved the construction of an elevated light-railway project in Mumbai.

Transportation experts say that this is progress, but that more work needs to be done to expedite planned projects. And, they say, better planning was needed to ensure that the new public-transportation systems would be integrated and complement each other, rather than compete for passengers.

"The right approach is to have a robust public-transport system," says Amitabh Bajpai, president of the Association for Intelligent Transport Systems India, a research and advocacy group. "But they haven't been integrated yet, so the encouragement to buy cars is still there."

That encouragement is there in more concrete form, as well. The national government's latest budget, for the fiscal year that began April 1, includes a cut in the excise tax on small cars to 16% from 24%. The measure is intended to help transform India into a manufacturing hub for small cars. But transportation experts fear it will worsen traffic jams and road safety. Nearly 100,000 people are killed on India's roads every year.

"I felt highly challenged when I saw the budget encouraging people to buy small cars," says Mr. Bajpai. "It could be that [smaller cars] are not safe, and this could create chaos in urban transport."

National Projects

Meanwhile, the building and upgrading of roads continues on a massive scale across the country. In 2000, the Indian government began a series of monumental upgrades to the national highway network, which carries nearly half of all traffic in the country.

Dubbed the National Highway Development Program, it started with a project to link India's four biggest cities -- New Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and Mumbai -- with a four- and six-lane highway running nearly 4,000 miles. Popularly known as the Golden Quadrilateral, the new road is nearly complete, at a cost of about $6.8 billion.

Another massive national road project, a 4,500-mile ribbon of four-lane highways connecting points at the far north, south, east and west of the country, is proceeding at a slower pace. Construction is a long way behind schedule, due to difficulties obtaining clearances from local bureaucracies and problems acquiring the thousands of acres needed. It is unlikely to be completed on time in December 2007.

The outlook is brighter for another gigantic road program geared to poor villages. The Prime Minister's Rural Roads Program may end up having the biggest impact on the country of all the current road projects, forging more than 200,000 miles of all-weather roads linking thousands of villages that for centuries have been severed from easy contact with the rest of the country.

Still, the rate of increase in vehicle ownership is clearly outpacing progress on the roads needed to handle that growth.

Morgan Stanley, in a report on infrastructure last year, suggested that India isn't spending enough on its roads, and said the quality of work being done on the country's roads is often substandard. Government spending is constrained by a large budget deficit and New Delhi's unwillingness to raise money by divesting stakes in government-controlled enterprises, the report said. "We believe that the pace of road development, though improving, is unlikely to be dramatic in the medium term," it concluded.

Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who was India's prime minister when the big national roads projects were launched, wanted them to project an image to the world of a reinvented, more efficient and unified India. They may have fulfilled that vision in some respects, but the image of a country stuck in traffic remains.