Commuters travelling from Banjara/Jubilee Hills towards Begumpet and Secunderabad had a harrowing time almost all day on Wednesday, as Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao’s return from Maharashtra after signing five inter-State agreements resulted in a huge traffic jam till late evening.
The congestion, mostly on the route going to Secunderabad, was a result of several TRS activists gathering at the Begumpet airport to welcome the Chief Minister. While traffic was slow-moving till about 11 a.m., it began to choke after 12 noon and continued to be in that situation for a few hours. With more and more activists arriving, the jam had a domino effect all the way till his camp office at Begumpet, due to which traffic on the Greenland’s flyover also came to a standstill.
“This is not acceptable. Traffic is usually heavy only in the evenings, but today, it took me more than an hour just to go from Punjagutta to Begumpet. Usually, it does not take more than 15 minutes to commute there,” fumed M. Narasimha, a senior citizen, who resides in Begumpet. Mannan Khan, a private employee working in Hi-tech city, said that he had to spend more than an hour and half to return to his house in Secunderabad.
Though the traffic police had issued an advisory to the public to take alternate routes in view of the meeting, the situation remained bad till evening, and only eased up late in the evening. “We did not block any of the roads, but asked the general public to avoid taking that route. Though there were a lot of people gathering for the meeting, we still managed to ensure that traffic was slow-moving. This, in spite of the ongoing metro rail works,” said a senior traffic police official.
