Jam session hits Gurgaon call centres

Heavy downpour catches employees off guard; many reach office hours after scheduled time

Heavy downpour catches employees off guard; many reach office hours after scheduled time

The scene above is of the Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway, and the picture only tells half the story. A 7 km long jam greeted those who chose the route on Wednesday night, courtesy the heavy showers that lashed the Capital yesterday. The worst hit were the call centres and MNCs that have their offices in Gurgaon.


Time : 22:30 pm
Clogged: There was about a 6 to 7 km long traffic jam at the Gurgaon
Express highway due to rains on Wednesday night.u00a0u00a0 PIC/MID DAY

Almost all the night shift employees reported at work 3 to 4 hours late. Many organisations were suffering from a huge manpower crunch, and the day shift workers had to stay on for several hours. Those who wished to go home had to wait endlessly as most of the cabs were stuck in traffic somewhere or the other. In an MNC, the whole of the night shift reached office at 11.30 pm, three hours behind schedule, as all the employees reside in Delhi.

"The time for our pick-up is two hours before the shift begins. On Wednesday for the 8.30 pm shift I was picked up at 7.30 pm from my residence in Lajpat Nagar. But we reached office only at 11.30 pm, and we were stuck in the jam for almost four hours. Even the cab drivers were fed up driving at snail's pace," said Manohar Sharama, a BPO worker.

Those who were waiting to go home had their own problems to narrate.

"I am in the 9 am shift and I left my home in Vikaspuri at 7.30 in the morning. But because of the jam I could get back home only at midnight. My family members were so worried, they called to ask whether they should come to pick me up, but I told them that if they came out on the roads they themselves would get stuck," said Akriti Sharma, an engineer in a reputed company in Gurgaon.

Some employees of an international call centre walked backed to their homes to escape the jam-packed roads.

HIGHWAY TO NOWHERE

Incessant rain since Sunday forced the closure of the busy Chandigarh-Ambala-Delhi National Highway on Wednesday after a breach in the bundh on the seasonal Tangri rivulet near Handesra and overflowing of a seasonal rivulet flooded the major stretch near Jharmari barrier on Punjab-Haryana border in Lalru.

"We work in the graveyard shift, and we usually reach home by 5 in the evening, but today we were stranded in the heavy traffic jam. In the beginning we thought that some accident or mishap had taken place but after an hour we realised that there were heavy traffic jams all over Delhi.

We barely covered a few metres in an hour and after a couple of hours, we decided to walk to our homes in Lajpat Nagar. We walked about 3 kilometres before we got a rickshaw.

The whole road was full of vehicles and there was no respite even for ambulances. I saw some VIP vehicles stuck in the jam with their sirens going at full blast but nowhere to go," said Vivek Singh, an international call centre employee.