Deepkamal Kaur

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, August 23

The commuters shuttling between Jalandhar and Phagwara since the farmers’ protest at Dhanowali for the past four days are a harassed lot, especially those following the Dhina village stretch or the main Deep Nagar road.

Both roads, which can be used to reach Jalandhar via Cantonment, are completely tattered. The rainfall since yesterday has made both the stretches completely muddy and marshy making the drive risky. While the main Deep Nagar road has not been relaid for the past many years, work of laying sewerage pipes is on at Dhina village ahead of Sansarpur, owing to which half of the road is lying dug up to create underground septic tanks.

Hoshiarpur route to ASR also congested

• During the ongoing farmers' protest, the commuters travelling to Jalandhar to holy city Amritsar from Chandigarh are preferring to use the Hoshiarpur route, but this passage, too, is besieged with various difficulties. This route is additionally 35 km longer than the normal direct route via Nawanshahr and Phagwara
• The congestion on the Hoshiarpur-Jalandhar highway has become so much that the traffic movement remains halted for long. The stretch across Adampur is the most affected as a flyover is under-construction and only a narrow passage is available for the to-and-fro movement. The commuters keep on honking the horns out of frustration, but this only aggravates the situation.

A government official posted in Jalandhar said: “I was coming to work from Nawanshahr this morning and chose Dhina route instead of Deep Nagar route. But to my horror, it was worse. There was bumper to bumper traffic and muck due to yesterday’s rain flying all around. There were no sign boards or danger signals installed around the deep trenches dug up for laying sewerage. Covering just 2km distance was a hell for me. Reaching office, I immediately sounded the city police and asked the officials concerned to at least dissuade the people from using this route as an alternate passage”.

Sachin Sharma, a city-based youth who had gone to Delhi to appear for a job interview and returned today, also shared his experience of using this route, “I had a train ticket for last evening but the train arrival time got put off by four hours. I immediately rushed to the ISBT. The bus halted at Phagwara bus stand in the wee hours today. I asked my father in Jalandhar to pick me by his car. He started from home via Sansarpur-Dhina route. His car broke on the way and he got stuck up there. I managed a taxi from Phagwara to reach him and it took me 40 minutes to reach him from Phagwara. We finally tied up the car with the taxi and reached home at 5 am today. It was such a horrendous time. A barely 20 minutes of distance became a nightmare for our family as everyone remained tense and was up the whole night.”

While the farmers had yesterday announced that the service lane along the main dharna site had been kept open, the commuters said the barricades kept by the Punjab Police along all flyovers on the stretch between Jalandhar and Phagwara prevented them from closing in near the dharna site.

“It was so annoying to see the barricades being installed on all flyovers for no reason. While the stretch from atop the flyovers could be covered in one to 1.5 minutes, the same distance was being covered via the congested service lanes in 10-15 minutes. The only reason I could figure out of keeping the flyovers closed was to encourage the commuters to start taking alternate routes available on the left and right sides of the service lane so as to reduce the traffic flow towards Jalandhar,” said Arshdeep Singh, a city-based businessman.