(From top): Members of a protest march enjoy a tea break on Monday afternoon while laying siege to College Street; two schoolboys on a clogged Chittaranjan Avenue decide enough is enough and walk back home from school. Pictures by Bishwarup Dutta

Never on a Monday should be the new motto on the streets of Calcutta. At least for all those headed to work the morning after cruising through a Sunday free of traffic snarls.

And March 3 was a double whammy for commuters as Calcutta was reduced to a crawl by a combination of usual Monday traffic — which is 40 per cent more than on any given Sunday — and traffic-stopper street protests.

“It was a bad day. We have been struggling to cope with the traffic mess since 12.15pm when some SUCI protesters blocked the Hazra intersection for a sudden demonstration,” said a senior officer of South Traffic Guard.

A string of rallies in the city’s central business district, led by Trinamul Congress and its allies, added to the traffic mess and paralysed movement.

If Trinamul-plus took over the Esplanade end of Chowringhee on Monday afternoon, members of the Paschimbanga Rajya Matsajibi Samity slammed the brakes on Rani Rashmoni Avenue around the same time.

The Trinamul rally hit the hardest, choking traffic flow from College Square to Chowringhee.

If Trinamul was protesting the “ration scam and Nandigram”, the issue that brought the Matsajibi Samity to the streets was the banning of licence for foreign trawlers.

“How can they be allowed to hold the city to ransom for no rhyme or reason? Can’t we as citizens demand our basic right to freedom of movement?” demanded a mother of two stuck in traffic while taking her elder son back home from school.

“My younger son has fever and so I needed to rush back home but God knows when I will be able to get there,” she said, fighting back tears of helplesseness.

Students writing their second paper of the ICSE exams also suffered, losing out on precious study time as they could not get home in a hurry.

“This only proves that the political parties just don’t care about our problems,” said Manish Lodha, 18.

Also taking the protest path to traffic paralysis were Forward Bloc members converging at Netaji Indoor Stadium and the Janawadi Forward Bloc laying siege to Metro Channel. If the first was opposed to the Dinhata killings, the other was an all-in-one attack for Singur, Nandigram and Dinhata.

The victims? Schoolchildren forced to walk home, parents failing to reach the school in time to pick up their little ones, commuters left stranded in the heart of the city...

“On any given Monday, traffic on Chowringhee is difficult to manage. But what made matters worse today was the fact that two out of three channels of Rani Rashmoni Avenue had to be closed owing to the protests,” said a senior traffic officer.