Missing in action: While Delhi crawls, where are the traffic cops?

WIth francis scott key arterial roadstead crosswise the working capital perennially clogged, the Delhi Traffic Police appears to be battling a crisis of its own making. Operating at a staggering 20% vacancy — with another 10% of staff effectively unavailable due to leaves, VIP duties, and other deployment — the consequences are not theoretical; they play out on every jammed intersection and unregulated flyover. And with the high-profile AI Impact Summit kicking off next week, likely bringing with it a surfeit of VIP cavalcades and route closures that will paralyse large swathes of the city, commuters are bracing for even more chaos.Official Delhi Traffic Police data accessed by HT underscores the scale of the problem. Against a sanctioned strength of 6,102 personnel, only 4,901 are currently in position. But the on-ground reality is far bleaker. A senior traffic police officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, revealed that on any given day, nearly 500 personnel are on leave, another 500 are diverted for special duties and VIP deployments, 482 are stationed at identified congestion hot spots, and scores more are tied up in pollution, or PUCC, checks, border security, and court appearances. This leaves a skeletal force of barely 2,500 personnel to regulate the city’s gargantuan1,800km arterial roadnetwork consisting of 1,527 traffic signals – a ratio that renders meaningful enforcement nearly impossible.ALSO READ | Delhi cops deploy new high-tech cameras to catch speeding, wrong-side drivers The toll of such manpower shortage is visible on the street. Poor enforcement of parking norms, rampant wrong-side driving, and barely monitored intersections translate into chaos on nearly every major road, at nearly every major junction.And the toll of such manpower shortage is also invisible on the street -- there are simply no traffic policemen around.Take Wednesday and Thursday for instance: arterial stretches including Ring Road, Mathura Road, Outer Ring Road, NH-48, and key corridors in central and south Delhi witnessed gridlocks for hours, with office-goers reporting delays of several hours. Roads resembled parking lots as vehicles crawled through intersections unmanned by traffic personnel. And all this on days when the city was experiencing predictable weekday traffic, and when there was nothing wrong with the weather.ALSO READ | Delhi: Homeless along AI Summit venue claim ‘forceful’ evictionSocial media, as always, became the city’s unofficial grievance cell. “The traffic in Delhi has been horrible for a while now, and the AI Impact Summit will make it hellish. Cancelling meetings next week,” wrote a user on Thursday. Another flagged the Palam Flyover snarls with no cop in sight: “Commuters facing long delays morning and evening. Kindly deploy staff.” At 9.28am, an X user tagged the traffic police from Panchkuiyan Marg, stranded on the way to Connaught Place. Half an hour later, another commuter on NH44 posted a screenshot of the crawl: “What is the use of a National Expressway when we spend 30 minutes for 3km?”The Delhi Traffic Police’s social media team continued to operate on autopilot.The standard response: “The area’s traffic inspector has been informed” has become a cruel punchline for commuters who report little to no visible change on the ground. A resident of Krishna Nagar in east Delhi, Pankaj Arora, 41, who goes to work in South Extension Delhi, said that he leaves for work around 8am and reaches around 10am every day due to traffic congestion. “I cross the ITO traffic jam and then I get stuck at several other junctions on the way. It’s been 10 years and nothing has changed,” he said.As congestion worsens, the gap between promise and delivery grows ever wider. In December last year, the traffic police identified 62 major hot spots – chronic choke points including Nehru Place, Ashram Chowk, Chirag Delhi, Mathura Road at Okhla junction, and the stretch outside Max Hospital in Saket – and vowed to ease movement through engineering fixes, signage upgrades, and junction redesign. Earlier this week, the Delhi government repackaged the same list, rolling out yet another decongestion plan.But for commuters, the plans and apparent fixes mentioned in press releases are rarely seen on the ground.Traffic officials admit that without urgent augmentation of manpower and swift execution of infrastructure fixes, even the best-laid plans will remain on paper. “We have about 1,200 Delhi Transport Corporation marshals deployed at some junctions, and GPS tracking for our vehicles. But traffic management is a multi-agency maze,” one of the officers HT spoke to conceded.With no cap on vehicle ownership and road capacity frozen, experts warn the capital is hurtling towards a tipping point, even as some experts insist it has crossed it already.S Velmurugan, chief scientist and head of the Traffic Engineering and Safety Division, CSIR-Central Road Research Institute (CRRI) said, “Traffic congestion is worsening in all the metropolitan cities of the country, and Delhi cannot be left behind.”“A state government can control the number of vehicles entering a perennially congested road network by levying surcharge during congestion hours. When people have to pay to commute, they’ll at least not take their personal vehicles out during peak hours unless they absolutely have to,” he said. The AI Impact Summit is merely the canary in the coal mine. If staffing deficits are not urgently addressed and hot spot plans remain stuck in bureaucratic aspic, Delhi’s roads will soon cease to be arteries of mobility—and become monuments to administrative inertia.