Hosur Road is hell. Period

Pounding leads to chaos on roads
Hosur Road is hell. Period

The Times of India

Hosur Road: The lifeline of the IT corridor looks like the backwaters of a turbulent sea. Human movement is recorded by the bumper-to-bumper serpentine lineup of traffic. If there was a hell in Bangalore, Hosur Road it was.

The road carries traffic of 17,000 PCU (passenger car units) per hour. Tuesday’s rain obliterated even the antenna of technology from the area. Every possible nook was inundated; and there was no difference between gutter-water, rainwater, sullage.

The road is the singular link between Tamil Nadu and the state, over 500 trucks ply on the stretch, a conglomerate of over 50 companies are housed there, with an estimated workforce of 45,000. Though there were shuttle services for many companies, nothing could withstand the fury of tempestuous rain. Says assistant commissioner of police Alok Kumar, who was there all day, “The movement of trucks has not been affected in that their movement hasn’t been officially restricted. But they cannot really move.’’

For the record, the busiest stretch in the city had a pace of half-a-km per hour, all of Tuesday.

The police didn’t allow autorickshaws between Madiwala and Electronic City, permitting only bigger vehicles to commute.

2 slip into manhole: A certain manhole adjacent to the Hosur Road flyover snuffed out two persons, one of whom was rescued later. On Monday night, in desperate bravado, Govindraj and Manivelan took a detour from the Hosur flyover towards the Silk Board. Everywhere they looked, there was only water. One step further and one man’s foot got sucked into a whirlpool. He extricated his foot and bent to retrieve his footwear but got trapped in the process.”

“To help him, his friend held out a hand but got whirled in too. While Govindraj was fished out much later in one piece, Maniselvan’s body is yet to be traced.

The sun set at 4 pm on Hosur Road, as the dark looming clouds hovered above, even righteous citizens in the vicinity started swearing. More so in the HSR Layout. Here’s what Ramakanth, an engineer whose house in Sector 6 has been in knee-deep water since Saturday night, says, “On Sunday morning, I called the BDA and they threw up their hands saying ‘what to do, saar!’. The milkman refused to come. We had to bribe him.”

“The children haven’t gone to school because they can’t step out. On Tuesday morning, though we had not called the Bangalore City Corporation, we were surprised to see some men who helped pump out gallons of water.’’

An all-day-long sight was of police personnel helping manoeuvre traffic, with sundry umbrellas and gumboots. The MEG too was deployed.
At the IPS Layout near HSR Layout, the houses of six IPS officers, three judges and ex-MP Puttaswamy Gowda were flooded.