Siddharth Roy
Guwahati has become a city suspended between ambition and congestion. New flyovers at busy junctions promise faster journeys, yet peak-hour traffic continues to test commuters’ patience. The problem is that these structures serve a purpose. They can remove dangerous crossings and ease specific bottlenecks. But when queues simply reappear at the next rotary, the city must ask a harder question: are we improving mobility, or merely moving the jam elsewhere?
The experience of the Maharaja Prithu flyover offered a recent illustration. After its inauguration in March 2026, commuters complained that congestion persisted around the rotary connecting it with the Ananda Ram Barua flyover. Such bottlenecks reveal the limits of treating traffic as a series of isolated engineering problems. A flyover may carry vehicles over one intersection, but it cannot by itself change where people live, where jobs are located or why thousands must travel to the same crowded corridors every morning.
Guwahati’s geography makes this challenge unusually acute. The Brahmaputra forms a major northern boundary, while hills, wetlands and reserve forests constrain development elsewhere. Commercial centres, government offices, hospitals and educational institutions have accumulated along a narrow east-west urban spine. The concentration of daily necessities in the core forces the road network to accommodate not only through traffic but also a significant volume of routine journeys. The city’s shape, not simply its traffic signals, is part of the problem.
The Government’s Master Plan for Guwahati Metropolitan Area 2025 recognised the need for a connected network of arterial roads, ring roads and alternative corridors, alongside integrated public transport. Its traffic projections anticipated substantial growth in private vehicles. The plan’s horizon has passed, but its central lesson remains relevant: roads cannot carry a growing city indefinitely if public transport and land use are not planned together. Guwahati now needs a fresh, publicly accountable mobility plan that measures success by reliable travel times and access to services, not just by kilometres of concrete.
This requires transit-orientated micro-townships: compact neighbourhoods built around dependable public transport, with homes, schools, clinics, markets, offices, parks and municipal services within convenient reach. North Guwahati and Sonapur could accommodate carefully planned urban centres, provided growth is supported by transport, water, sewerage, drainage and social infrastructure before large settlements arrive. We should aim to avoid pushing people to the outskirts and leaving them reliant on long commutes. It should be to create places where fewer daily journeys are necessary in the first place.
North Guwahati has a natural advantage in its connection to the main city across the Brahmaputra. The passenger ropeway connects Panbazar and Rajaduar over a route of about 1.82 kilometres, showing that transport need not always occupy road space. But a single connection cannot transform mobility on its own. Frequent buses, safe walking routes, feeder services and dependable ferry links must connect terminals to homes, colleges, workplaces and markets. Sonapur, meanwhile, needs planned employment zones and public facilities so that residents are not compelled to travel into central Guwahati for every essential service.
The next priority is to make public transport a credible alternative to private vehicles. City buses should operate on coordinated routes and published timetables, with adequate frequency during peak hours, accessible stops and reliable information about arrivals. A common digital ticketing system should eventually cover buses, the ropeway and ferries, allowing passengers to change modes without buying separate tickets each time. Digital tools will help, but they cannot substitute for clean vehicles, safe boarding, disciplined operations and routes that serve where people actually live.
Guwahati must also reclaim its rivers as public assets. The Bharalu and Bahini corridors are often treated chiefly as drainage channels, yet restored river edges could combine flood management, green spaces and walking or cycling paths where engineering and environmental assessments show such restoration is safe. Guwahati Smart City’s Mora Bharalu rejuvenation proposal includes cleaning and desilting and identifies a proposed sewage treatment plant with a capacity of 185 million litres per day. Such plans should be integrated with pollution control, sewer connections and floodplain protection. A greenway cannot succeed if untreated sewage continues to enter the river or encroachment narrows its flow.
Planning must protect wetlands and hill slopes from speculative growth while also setting aside land for affordable homes close to reliable public transportation. Without such safeguards, micro-townships could reproduce congestion and inequality. Growth must follow carrying capacity, not merely the availability of developable land, and public services must arrive before residents do.
These changes demand stronger coordination among the Guwahati Municipal Corporation, Guwahati Metropolitan Development Authority, transport agencies and neighbouring local bodies. We need to make decisions about transportation and land use together, with open budgets, public input, and clear accountability for delivery. New township approvals should be based on the availability of infrastructure and affordable housing, not on the possibility of speculative development happening before basic services. Walking, cycling and universal access must be treated as essential parts of the network, not decorative additions after roads are built.
Flyovers will remain necessary at selected locations. The mistake is to expect them to solve a problem created by concentrated land use and inadequate alternatives to driving. A city is not mobile merely because cars can move quickly above it; it is mobile when a student, nurse, office worker or elderly resident can reach daily destinations safely and affordably.
Guwahati needs to move from a construction-led response to a people-centred urban strategy. Micro-townships, integrated buses, river transport and restored waterways will require patience and sustained investment. Yet the cost of postponement is paid daily in lost time, polluted air, stress and missed opportunities. The real measure of progress is not how high the next flyover rises, but how many journeys citizens no longer have to make and how easily they can make the ones that matter.
(The author is a consultant to Rashtriya Raksha University under the Ministry of Home Affairs, a civil engineer, and a columnist. The views are personal. He can be reached at siddharth001.roy@gmail.com.)