A 10-km-long traffic jam brought traffic on the Delhi-Jaipur Expressway to a crawl near the Delhi-Gurugram border on Friday evening following heavy rain, leaving hundreds of commuters stranded for hours, police said.
“We found slow moving traffic from Iffco Chowk around 4pm. “There is no spot to even take even a U-turn now. I am trapped in my vehicle for the last three hours. “Those vehicles destined to reach IGI international airport for dropping passengers are not being touched. We have issued advisory for such vehicles to travel through Dwarka expressway,” he added.
The traffic started crawling near Shiv Murti in Mahipalpur, Delhi, and the tailback reached Udyog Vihar Phase-IV in Gurugram by 6.30pm, traffic police officers said. Now, its 6.30pm but we have not been able to cross the Sirhaul toll plaza on the Delhi-Gurugram border which is a distance of hardly about six kilometres,” he said, adding his vehicle was still 200 metres behind the plaza.
Narayan Acharya, a commuter travelling from Gurugram to Kathmandu in Nepal by road, told HT that he had been trapped in the jam for the last two and a half hours. Vikas Kumar, another commuter travelling towards Delhi from Gurugram, told HT that the opposite carriageway leading to Jaipur was completely empty. Looking at the scenario, it seems it may take two to three more hours before I may be able to cross this entire stretch of jam,” he said, adding rain had further aggravated the situation. Assistant commissioner of police (traffic headquarters) Satyapal Yadav said that severe waterlogging near Shiv Murti in Delhi had resulted in the several-kilometre-long jam on the expressway. “We have diverted the traffic moving towards Delhi via the expressway to MG Road from the elevated section of the Iffco chowk to travel towards Aya Nagar,” he said. Yadav said he was having continuous conversations with his counterpart in Delhi, who had informed him that pumps had been installed near Shiv Murti to remove the waterlogging. “The main drain there was not functional due which the water logging took place as per Delhi traffic police officials,” he said.
