Mussoorie, Come mid-May and the police stationed in Mussoorie prepares itself to fight a battle of a different kind, traffic menace! The local police here doubles up as traffic constables ensuring smooth traffic inflow. But, with every passing year the hill-station comes to a grinding halt in the brief summer months that we witness.
Station House Officer, Mussoorie Bhawna Kainthola and her team of 53 constables including women constables are working round the clock, in uniform for over 12 hours a day in peak summer, walking the length and breadth of the hill-station to unclog roads and by-lanes to keep the bumper to bumper traffic on the move. Bhawna briefs us, “we have kept the traffic inching its way in and out of the town moving. Since the 5th of June, when we saw close to 8000-9000 vehicles to now 5000-6000 vehicles a day, it has been a thankless, uphill task.”
For weeks now, the priority for the local police has been to streamline parking and to depute sufficient man power at bottlenecks, exit and entry points to and fro famous tourist spots like Kempty Falls, Company Garden at one end to Landour and Dhanolti in the opposite direction. Bhawna Kainthola also informs us how her team has been personally requesting drivers to turn off their air conditioners so that the fumes and heat emitting from vehicles can be reduced. “Its not only that the number of cars has doubled in the recent past, the size of the vehicles has increased as well with Fortuners, Innovas, and large SUVs find it difficult to negotiate bottlenecks making our job more difficult,” she tells us.
This unending tsunami of people and cars making their way to Mussoorie is impossible to control, yet the local police, with limited man-power is doing a commendable job under the abled leadership of their SHO who leads from the front.
