Rain brings more chaos than comfort in Gurugram

GURUGRAM: Office-goers, students headed for an exam and flyers travelling for work meets — ‘Monday blues’ for them came on the road as they battled a maze of challenges that freak weather and shaky infrastructure had hurled at them.
A road cave-in here, a flooded street there and a stretch blocked by an uprooted tree somewhere else — there were hurdles everywhere that strong winds and 73.5mm of rain early in the morning brought in their wake. Roads in several areas developed craters. There were cave-ins around IFFCO Chowk on the Delhi-Gurugram expressway, Sheetla Mata Road, Atul Kataria Chowk, Basai and Palam Vihar, among others. The service lanes of the Delhi-Gurgaon expressway and several internal stretches in Sushant Lok, South City, Palam Vihar and Gold Course road were under knee-deep water.
The result? Stuck on the road for hours, people were late to reach office, students got held up for their exams and several cancelled flights turned a nightmare for travellers.
Although the rain brought relief from the punishing spells of heatwave — the minimum temperature dipped to 16°C — there was no opportunity to soak in the comfort that the showers brought. Dharm Veer Singh had left his Sector 82 home an hour in advance to reach his son Dipen to the exam centre in Sector 54. Dipen had his computer science paper for the CBSE Class 10 boards.
“There were traffic jams everywhere — the Kherki Daula toll, IFFCO Chowk and Golf Course Road. Police, too, could not do much. My son was 25 minutes late for his exam. One of his friends waded through water to reach the centre, another hitched a ride. Many of them were 25-30 minutes,” said Singh, president of the Mapsko Casabella RWA. “Why don’t the MCG and GMDA act in advance?”
It wasn’t easy for travellers either. Priyanka Sidana, who works with Hero MotoCorp, was stuck on the road for almost two hours.
Her ordeal was far from over even when she reached the airport. “My first flight to Pune got cancelled. I then booked an alternative flight, which also got delayed by three hours. I booked a third flight, which was again three hours late. Half the day was wasted in this. I finally boarded an evening flight,” she told TOI.
The Gurgaon administration did issue an advisory, asking corporate houses and private offices to allow employees to work from home. But by the time it did, the city was already much on the move.
Sharad Mehta, resident of Sector 7, said almost all his colleagues were late for work. “The distance that we cover in minutes took hours. Most of us were late,” he added.
Aniket Kumar, a sales executive with a Japanese company in Udyog Vihar, had to cancel his meeting. “It took me several weeks to fix this meeting. But I had no option but to reschedule it. It wasn’t possible as the roads were waterlogged and choked,” he added.
For those working from home, it wasn’t any better. There were power cuts in several sectors and the internet was feeble. “In my area, there was no power from 4am. Backup was exhausted by 9am and my phone battery died. Till none, I couldn’t even inform my manager,” said Nitin Singh, a content writer who lives in Sector 17.
Around 2,200 cops were out on the streets, many of them in knee-deep water. There were around 25 control room vehicles, 40 individual riders, 10 tow trucks, five earthmovers and over 100 police station vehicles.
Complaints about waterlogging and snarls started pouring in from as early as 6.30am. Route diversions were enforced and tow trucks came to the rescue of vehicles stranded in water. Teams at the Integrated Command and Control Centre (ICCC), set up by the GMDA to monitor CCTV footage of the roads, started sharing real-time data with the traffic cops. This prevented the city from coming to a total standstill. By late afternoon, the traffic situation had become normal.
What made it tougher for the cops was the sheer volume of traffic on Monday morning. “We deployed our teams at key points from early morning. They managed the traffic situation and made efforts to drain out the water. There was congestion, obviously, as vehicles moved slowly,” DCP (traffic) Ravinder Singh Tomar said.
(with inputs from Siddharth Tiwari)
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