Traffic snarl has become a routine affair at Khandagiri junction, which houses prominent tourist spots Khandagiri and Udaygiri hills, institutes such as the ITER and residential colonies such as Jagamara and Pokhariput, in the city.

Here, the authorities’ idea of building a flyover still remains an idea and is far from being implemented. What the local people and commuters get is the much-used assurances of getting things done “at the earliest”.

The junction is tagged as a black spot. The unregulated vehicular flow, coupled with traffic violations, had claimed 32 lives between 2013 and 2015 at this spot. The authorities are preparing a fresh list of black spots, which will be based on the accident data between 2015 and 2017. As the compilation is going on, they refused to reveal it now.

According to the ministry of road transport and highways, black spot on the national highways is a 500-metre-long stretch, where five road accidents involving fatalities have taken place in last three calendar years.

At this junction, minor accidents have become a daily affair, while the inadequate traffic personnel have utterly failed in managing traffic.

“It’s pretty inconvenient, and at the same time, risky to commute through this junction. It’s always advisable to go for other alternatives,” said local resident Gangaram Hota, who, however, has to travel through this junction for business purpose.

The works department with the consent of the National Highways Authority of India had in 2016 come up with the idea to build a flyover here, for which the tender was called, design was prepared and cost was approved in early 2017. But so far, the project has not seen the light of the day.

“We have proposed the construction of flyover with the approval of the government and submitted the design to the highway authorities. They took it further and got the approval from New Delhi. Since the highway is their property, we can’t take up the project on our own,” said chief engineer roads O.P. Patel.

“There were some problems with the project executor, so we had to back out from it. We are in the process of floating a fresh tender since other modalities for the bridge have already been finalised. We are hopeful to finalise the tender at the earliest,” said a highway authority official.

The junction can be considered as the gateway to the city from the Khurda side and the end point for the people from the Cuttack side.

Thousand of vehicles pass through the junction every day. But because of traffic violations accidents are a regular issue here. The junction does have two parallel approach roads on both the sides, but it falls prey to irregular movement of smaller vehicles.

The junction is manned by three regular traffic cops and two home guards, but not for much help of commuters.

“The traffic personnel are not equipped to handle the vehicular flow. The violations are rampant mainly for local people and the police just can’t do anything about it,” said Nigam Jena, a commuter at the junction.

A traffic cop at the junction told this newspaper that the more they tried to control the vehicular flow, mainly the smaller ones, the more they kept on violating it. “I guess this junction has more number of traffic personnel after AG Square. We do catch the violators and levy fine on them, but the next day, it gets repeated with other violators once again,” said the cop.