TRAVAILS OF A THOROUGHFARE

Traffic trundles past a cycle van loaded with pumpkin that overturned after falling into a crater near Michael Nagar on Jessore Road on Tuesday afternoon. Pictures by Bishwarup Dutta

Craters, mounds of mud and traffic snarls are everywhere on Jessore Road — (from top left) the airport’s Adhai Number Gate, near Madhyamgram, along Michael Nagar and near Birati

A heavily cratered stretch of Jessore Road along the airport that puts commuter and car to a test of endurance every day tried the patience of a pair of high court judges on Wednesday.

One of them returned midway through the journey to Barasat to attend an official programme. Another reached his destination 55 minutes after the scheduled start of the event.

“Prochondo jam…prochondo jam. Aami phire ashte badhyo hoyechhi (Terrible snarl…terrible snarl. I was forced to return),” Justice Tapen Sen of Calcutta High Court said when Metro contacted him after hearing about the judges’ plight.

Justice Sen was supposed to attend the inauguration of an alternative dispute redress centre at Barasat court. Police sources said he decided to turn back from near BT College, around 6km before his destination.

His colleague Justice Asim Banerjee, who reached almost an hour after the scheduled start of the programme at 5pm, publicly apologised for the delay.

“Aami paley hawa lagiye thik samaye beriyechilam kintu prai arai ghanta rastay atke gechhilam (I had set out at the right time but got stuck for almost two-and-a-half hours on the road,” said Justice Banerjee, who is also the chairman of the West Bengal Legal Services Authority.

The judges’ plight mirrors that of thousands of daily commuters who have little choice but to take this busy road that is a traffic nightmare at the best of times and a sheer torture when craters sprout every monsoon.

“The condition of village roads is better than the stretch between the airport and Madhyamgram. On top of that, you have me-first motorists making a mockery of road rules in the absence of policing. The cops are inept and the drivers don’t care much for them either,” said Kaushik Bhattacharya, regional business head of a logistics company.

Encroachments on either side that the authorities refuse to remove, have reduced the road width and created multiple bottlenecks that could hold up a commuter by an hour and more on a bad day.

Metro had travelled the stretch between the airport and Madhyamgram on Tuesday and found it hard to pick out the worst stretch of the more than 5km ride.

At a spot barely 100 metres before the BT College junction from where Justice Sen’s car turned back, the craters are so large that vehicles break down regularly. The stretch near the Adhai Number Gate is just as bad and accident-prone.

Two persons were injured in a car collision on Wednesday evening at almost the same spot where an accident had occurred the previous afternoon. “Around 7.20pm, a white-coloured Toyota Innova hit a Hyundai i10 from the left. Both the injured persons were in the i10,” a policeman said.

He blamed the condition of the road for most accidents.

Sibabrata Chowdhury, the zonal sales manager of a pharma company, and his neighbour Nipan Sarma, a senior executive with another MNC, were stranded near Michael Nagar for more than an hour on Tuesday night after their car broke down on hitting a crater “large enough to swallow a Nano”.

When vehicles stall during peak hours, the snarls can take all day to clear. “Every other day, a vehicle breaks down because of the poor road. By the time a towing van arrives, traffic is paralysed,” said an autorickshaw driver.

The snarls originating at BT College are the longest because of encroachments on either side. The average vehicle speed if traffic does move is not more than 10kmph.“It should not take more than 20 minutes to reach Madhyamgram from the airport but it takes an hour,” said Sumita Roy, who takes the road to escort her son back from school.

Mothers waiting outside housing complexes for school buses to bring their children home say that their vigil has increased by at least 20 minutes since Jessore Road went from bad to worse.

A bureaucratic tangle is apparently holding up repairs. The National Highways Authority of India used to maintain the road until it handed over the stretch from the airport till Barasat to the PWD around seven months ago. The PWD apparently won’t carry out repairs till the “defect liability period” is over.

“The NHAI repaired the road less than a year ago. There is a defect liability period, during which if the road breaks, the agency has to repair it again,” a PWD engineer said.

Maybe they could include a liability clause for broken backs.

How has the condition of Jessore Road affected you?

Tell ttmetro@abpmail.com