Traffic crawls in Lutyens’ Delhi as road caves in near India Gate

NEW DELHI: Traffic in Lutyens’ Delhi came to a crawl during peak hours after a massive road cave-in near the C-Hexagon-Akbar Road crossing on Wednesday morning. Snarls choked almost all connectors to the C-Hexagon, with bumper-to-bumper traffic on all roads in the area. In the rest of the city too there were gridlocks due to unregulated movement of the kanwariyas.
The cave-in caused jams on Bhagwan Das Road, Akbar Road, Zakir Hussain Marg, Pandara Road and other arms of the C-Hexagon. “There was huge traffic on central Delhi roads especially from Akbar Road-C-Hexagon towards Rajpath Road-C-Hexagon due to the cave in,” said a senior traffic police officer.
Police officers said that normalcy was restored around afternoon but said the situation could again go out of hand during the peak hours on Thursday.
The pit is almost 10-feet wide and workers there said it would take three days to repair it. NDMC officials, who are overseeing the repair, said that a leaking water pipeline could be the reason why the road caved in. Traffic officials said that the area has been barricaded and that heavy vehicles could access the road only one at a time. They said the department had sent reminders to civic bodies about taking corrective action on these stretches.
In other parts of the city, kanwariyas reduced the traffic movement to a snail’s pace on Ring Road. So much so, that a distance of 5km on a south Delhi stretch took more than an hour-and-a-half to cover, said commuters.
“It took me more than two hours to just cross the ITO flyover on the Ring Road. I had to switch off my car ignition and wait for nearly an hour,” said Arvind Kumar, an executive with a private company.
Kanwariya movement in areas like Sardar Patel Marg and Dhaula Kuan made travel through Lutyens’ Delhi even worse. Commuters took to social media to register complaints. According to one commuter, it took him more than 45 minutes to cross the stretch between Bhagwan Das Road and Rajpath.
Traffic police sources said that besides the usual choke points across the city, 20 new points where kanwariyas have gathered were identified and corrective measures taken to control their movements.