Darjeeling: With the ongoing tourist rush to the Hills, Darjeeling is once again in the grip of serpentine traffic jams. The ride from Jorebungalow to Darjeeling, an 8 km ride, is taking around 3 hours at present. All the roads in Darjeeling town and the surrounding areas are chock-a-block with traffic. Patients, students, office goers, daily commuters as well as the tourists flocking the hill town face immense hardships owing to this. The major damper is that there will be no immediate respite from this and the situation is expected to worsen with each tourist season.
“The tourists are back and so are the endless traffic jams. It is a nightmare situation, especially for the local residents. Students are missing classes, the condition of patients deteriorates, caught in traffic snarls and not making it on time to the hospitals. The hills depend largely on tourism but for how long can we take this?” questioned Penjoma Lama, a local resident. The summer tourist season had taken off on a low note with Operation Sindoor casting a cloud. There were a large number of cancellation of bookings. “However, with things normalising from around mid May with Kashmir out of bounds along with North Sikkim, there is a huge rush to Darjeeling. All our rooms are booked to capacity till the end of June,” stated Amitava Acharya, hotelier.
The social media is full of posts by local residents of the daily ordeals they have to face everyday owing to the endless traffic jams. They have pulled up the local administration, state and Central government for having failed miserably to resolve the issue. Transport organisations have embarked on protests programmes but till now nothing has yielded any result.
Darjeeling roads can handle upto 6,000 vehicles a day. However, this number shoots up to around 20,000 in a day during peak season. The Gorkhaland Territorial Administration in consultation with the PWD has been mulling alternate routes to the town since 2003 but they are yet to see the light of day. GTA chief Anit Thapa stated that the projects of alternate roads would take time to complete as they would involve land acquisition, compensations and other technical hitches. He further claimed that the project to construct the circular road from Lebong to the 3rd Mile is awaiting financial approval.