For many local residents of Siliguri, the city once known as the “Gateway to the Northeast” has become a daily gridlock and a potent election issue as West Bengal heads towards the 2026 Assembly polls.
Long regarded as a strategic transit and trade hub for the Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal (BBIN) sub-region, Siliguri is now emerging as a test case of stalled infrastructure, administrative friction and political blame-shifting — with mounting frustration among voters.
Vivek Mishra, a commercial driver, does not look at a wristwatch to tell the time. Instead, he tracks the length of the shadow cast by a stationary truck on the Siliguri–Guwahati highway.
“Five kilometres in thirty minutes in Siliguri,” Mishra said. “Sometimes forty. If you go toward Sevoke Road, you don’t find a road; you find a parking lot.”
The side lanes have seen more traffic over the years than the flyover.
Traffic congestion now defines daily life, with large parts of the city slowing to a crawl from mid-morning until evening.
“Siliguri is a bottleneck from 9.30 -- 10 am to 7 pm in the evening. If one doesn’t know the bylanes, then they are stuck. One needs to have at least an hour and a half in hand to go anywhere in the city,” said Debashish Basak, who works at the University of North Bengal.
At the centre of the anger is the long-delayed Burdwan Road flyover — once projected as a flagship infrastructure project, now seen as a symbol of bureaucratic inertia.
“It’s been at least seven years. Minimum,” Mishra said. “And I don’t think this flyover will even help the main problem. The real traffic jam is at Ghoda More, where the railway gates are always down. You go ten times, and you get stuck seven times.”
“There are no parking facilities. Shopkeepers park where they want, and the road becomes narrow. If I stop for ten minutes, I get a fine, but the road is half-covered by parked cars anyway,” he added.
Local residents say the problem runs deeper than a single project.
“It is an unplanned city. The entire matter revolves around Hill Cart Road and Bidhan Road. Darjeeling More and Venus More are always congested because of this. There was a plan for basement parking during the Left rule, but it lies deserted near Bidhan Road. It wasn’t completed when the TMC came to power. Now these roads are congested because of parking,” Basak said.
“The flyover that started around 2016 or 2017 is still under construction — even in 2026 it has not been made operational. If work continues in such a sluggish manner, and half-done projects are abandoned, how will anything improve?”
The flyover remains inert, a monument to bureaucratic delay.
The congestion has spilled into residential areas such as Deshbandhupara, Hakimpara and Haidarpara, while local residents point to a parallel environmental decline.
“Two rivers that once flowed through the middle of Siliguri — Jorapani and Fuleswari — have now turned into drains. When you pass over the small bridges above these rivers, there is a strong foul smell. Club this with the traffic, you get not only noise pollution but river pollution too,” said Rahul Dutta, a resident of Deshbandhupara.
Several key infrastructure projects remain incomplete or underutilised, including integrated check posts at Jaigaon and Panitanki, and a dry port developed in 2015. Rail connectivity to Bhutan via Hasimara continues to be limited.
The political blame game over these delays has intensified ahead of the polls.
At the Siliguri Municipal Corporation, mayor Gautam Deb of the Trinamool Congress said the state had completed its share of work, accusing central agencies of holding up progress.
“PWD has finished the work,” Deb said. “The railways took a very long time; they delayed it intentionally and didn’t complete it before the elections. Even now, they haven’t given the official handover.”
But Shankar Ghosh, the BJP MLA from Siliguri, offered a sharply different account.
“The work in the PWD section, the state government’s section, took a long time,” Ghosh said. “Why this work was handled this way is not comprehensible. Both the state and the railways should present a clear picture to the people.”
The contest extends beyond the flyover.
A crucial two-kilometre stretch near Fulbari on NH-27 continues to operate as a single-lane bottleneck, restricting the movement of heavy vehicles.
Deb attributed the delay to a legal dispute over land compensation. “The Highway Authority did not accept the arbitrator's rate. They went to the High Court; it took many days,” he said.
Ghosh blamed the state government. “The state government did not acquire the land,” he said. “It’s not about money. It’s about land acquisition problems.”
He further accused the state administration of obstructing central projects, describing it as a breakdown in cooperative governance.
The work has resumed again before the elections.
Caught between these competing claims are local residents and commuters, for whom the issue is less about accountability and more about outcomes.
The mayor has outlined a set of proposed interventions, including improved connectivity at Darjeeling More, an eastern bypass extension, a flyover at Thakurnagar and a parallel Hill Cart Road, which he says could ease congestion within two to three years.
For now, however, these remain promises.
As Siliguri heads to the polls, the question for voters is no longer who is to blame, but whether years of delays and daily gridlock will translate into votes against the incumbent.
Until then, the city remains stuck.
The BJP won the seat in 2021 with a vote share of 50.6 per cent.The CPM won the seat in 2016.
Silugri goes to vote in the first phase of the Bengal Assembly election on April 23.