Pardon me for being impudent, but I must say this plainly. It has been over six years since I joined my job in Bijbehara town, and in all these years I have not once seen the town’s traffic sorted out. Seasons have changed, Deputy Commissioners have come and gone, but the traffic mess has stayed where it was, eating up hours of everyone’s day.Bijbehara does not need another temporary fix. It needs a practical solution, and that solution needs the support of everyone who has a stake in this town: the administration, the traffic police, transporters, shopkeepers, street vendors, and the common people who have to pass through, whether they are going from Srinagar to Anantnag or Kulgam, or from Anantnag to Srinagar. At the same time, the solution should not punish the street vendor, the shopkeeper or anyone else who earns a living from the market. The market is what keeps this town alive. A plan that treats it as the problem will neither be fair nor will it last.

I am not saying this to blame any officer who performs duty in the town. I am saying it because the jam has become so normal that nobody is surprised by it anymore. It has become a habit for everyone who travels through Bijbehara. Shopkeepers plan their day around it. Parents leave early for school. Drivers switch off their engines and wait. And quite often, somewhere in that line of vehicles, there is an ambulance with its siren on and no way to move ahead.

When the new NH-44 was opened a few years back, many of us thought towns like Bijbehara, Awantipora and Pampore would finally get some relief, that there would be less honking and less of the chaos everyone notices. We were told the through traffic........

© Greater Kashmir