Editorial

Learn From the Samdong-Kambal Situation
The residents of Samdong-Kambal have denied passage to heavy vehicles diverted to the road running through their area [the ‘Ipsing Road from Samdong Zero to Raley]. This road links up to the Khamdong-Tumin road, an alternative for the Singtam-Dikchu road to North Sikkim which cannot take trucks ever since a 48-wheeler took down the Rangchang Bridge on this route on 19 December last month.
It is important to bear in mind that the closure of the regular Singtam-Dikchu road to North Sikkim is a major setback since this was the most convenient and reliable [well, as reliable as roads can get in Sikkim] access to the district. It is a short 46 km from Singtam to Mangan via Dickhu, and the road, for most part, save some notorious landslide zones, is among the better roads in the State. To bypass this alignment and move via Gangtok to Mangan stretches the Singtam-Mangan journey to nearly a 100 kms and the road beyond Gangtok is not easy for heavy vehicles to negotiate. Needless to add, economics, convenience and safety issues convince transporters to stick to the Singtam-Dickhu alignment, and that is what they settled for when the Old Rangchang Bridge was cleared to carry only 5 tonnes of weight. They climbed up from Raley to Samdong Zero, through the Khamdong-Tumin road down to Dikchu and on to Mangan. The Samdong-Raley barricade which began on 31 December however put an end to that option and vehicles then took the option of climbing up [or vice versa] directly from Dickhu to Rakdong, linking up with Gangtok and on to Singtam. This, however, is not even a pitched road and the heavy loads conspired with the downpour of the past few days to leave the driving surface too slushy for driving any more. This is admittedly a temporary situation, but reflects accurately the lack of planning in resolving a troublesome situation.
The Singtam-Dikchu road, it has already been established, is important. It is also clear that it will be some time until a better bridge spans Rangchang khola and allows heavy vehicles through. The alternatives on the same alignment, it was always clear, would be used, but no effort was made to either monitor traffic to ensure safety of pedestrians on this rural road or even to regulate traffic [like releasing heavy vehicles in batches] to minimise damage on these roads which are obviously ill-equipped to take this kind of traffic. Agreed, road strengths cannot be reinforced overnight, but speed limits and crowding can be regulated to minimise damage. This was not done, leading to a suspected hit-and-run death on the road and extensive damage to the cross drains along it. The Samdong-Kambal barricade is now as old as the New Year, and interestingly, no major effort has been made to convince them to allow vehicles through. This is perhaps because even the authorities sympathise with their protest and agree with the arguments raised by them to keep truck traffic away. But things need not have come to such a pass and finding other alternative roads is not the solution because none of the roads are in a position to handle unregulated additional traffic. The roads along the Singtam-Dikchu alignment are essentially rural roads and the NH 31A through Gangtok already burdened with snarls of its own traffic to be in a position to accommodate trucks headed for North Sikkim. The only solution then is to regulate traffic, with even the option of sending trucks in batches over different routes considered. This will achieve to things – one, it will ensure that hit-and-run cases like the one along the Samdong-Raley road are not as impossible to crack, and two, it will convince the people that not only is the situation [of a lost Singtam-Dikchu road] vexed, but the administration clued into their concerns as well and working towards easing the burden. Stakeholders from the area can also be involved in the process.