Deshapriya Park ties city in knots

KOLKATA: No `Eto boro? Sotti?' posters were plastered all over the city this year. Still, Deshapriya Park basked in last year's glory and continued to draw crowds in hordes. Such was the rush of revellers that the entire south Kolkata traffic collapsed as pandal-hoppers pushed and shoved for one look at the 'Hazar Haath, Hazar Asaura' idol.
Earlier in the day, police commissioner Rajeev Kumar assured of foolproof plans to tackle the rush but by 6pm, police officers on the roads looked clueless.A major part of south Kolkata went out of bounds for vehicles. Rashbehari Avenue, Southern Avenue, Gariahat Road, SC Mullick Road, Park Circus and Amir Ali Avenue were the worst-hit.Netizens took to social media to vent their anger. “Traffic movement is pathetic at Ballygunge and Gariahat. It seems Kolkata Police has failed even this year in traffic management,“ Sudipta Banerjee wrote on Facebook.
Police were forced to divert all Deshapriya Park-bound buses from Minto Park, Gariahat And Sarat Bose Road to allow space for revellers. Arijit Dutta, owner of Priya Cinema located next to Deshapriya Park, sounded worried. “The situation around Deshpriya Park is very grim. The way crowd is building up since Tuesday , it appears to be a repeat of last year. When I left for a shoot at 5.30pm on Wednesday , the entire area was swamped by revellers. I returned at 6.30am to find the situation unchanged. It was same even on Thursday ,“ he said.
But then, revellers like Nandan Banerjee from Sonarpur, who visited Deshapriya Park with his two-month old baby , were not complaining. “I had come for a check-up of my child at Sishu Mangal hospital. I thought that since I missed last year's puja here, this was my chance. You never know when they might shut it down again,“ said Banerjee.
With Deshapriya Park hogging the limelight, pujas organized close to it -Tridhara, Ekdalia Evergreen, Badamtala Asar Sangha, 95 Pally and Selimpur -also saw a surge in footfall. By 7pm, vehicles on EM Bypass came to a grinding halt as well. A dri ve from Ruby crossing to Rashbehari Av enue, which is usually a 15-20 minutes ride, took more than 1.5 ho urs. Commissioner Rajeev Kumar sa id there were multiple reasons for the snarls. “Government offices might be shut but the schools and central government offices were still open. We have deployed 14000 cops and another 6000 volunteers for managing the crowd. They were out on the road by 4pm and things are bound to improve.One can always argue why we did not begin deployment right after Mahalaya, but then, my force would have found it difficult to sustain the rigorous workload on main puja days,“ said Kumar.
Police did bring some discipline on the roads by 8pm. The situation looked better in central Kolkata, which has witnessed severe jams over the past one week. Kumar -who claimed that the Utsav app had seen over 7000 downloads -urged commuters to use apps and social media to know the traffic condition before venturing out.