By Danny K. Rajee
When I moved back to Shillong. The first thing that struck me — before the pine smell, before the cool air, before the familiar faces — was the traffic on GS Road. It was 10 in the morning on a Tuesday. We hadn’t moved in thirty minutes. My cousin, who was driving, just shrugged. “This is every day now,” he said.
That shrug bothers me more than the traffic itself.
“As villages turn into towns and towns into cities, something quieter disappears”. The Ghosts of Indian Small Towns, Ruskin Bond
Shillong was never built to be a city. It became one accidentally, a colonial hill station that slowly swallowed itself whole. The British laid down roads meant for the occasional motor car and horse cart. Nobody planned for the tens of thousands of vehicles now crawling through Police Bazaar daily, or the truck convoys that bottleneck Laitumkhrah before eight in the morning. The terrain — those same hills that make Shillong beautiful — makes expansion nearly impossible. You can’t just bulldoze a ridge to add a lane.
What’s strange is that none of this is news. People have been complaining about Shillong traffic for at least fifteen years. And yet, visiting Police Bazaar on a Saturday afternoon still feels like voluntarily entering a slow disaster. The Khyndai Lad junction becomes practically impassable. Iewduh, the oldest and most beloved market in the city, is often unapproachable by vehicle. These aren’t new problems — we’ve just become numb to them.
The shared taxi system is one of those things about Shillong that locals love and defend fiercely, and I understand why. For decades it was the only reliable way to get around. Fixed routes, cheap fares, and drivers who knew every shortcut in the city. But let’s be honest about what it actually looks like in practice now: a dozen taxis idling at a stand, waiting to fill up before departing, each carrying maybe five people, each adding to a road that’s already clogged. We’ve essentially built our public transport around a system that’s as inefficient as private vehicles but with the inconvenience of shared ones.
The fix isn’t complicated in theory — small electric buses on fixed timetables would do the job — but it’s politically messy. Taxi unions are powerful here. Any serious proposal to reform public transport in Shillong will immediately run into the question of livelihoods, and that’s a real concern that deserves real answers, not the usual government handwave. Shimla managed some version of this reform. Gangtok too. Neither of those cities is much larger or richer than Shillong. We should stop treating this as an impossible problem.
Parking is where the city is perhaps most obviously failing itself.
Walk down any commercial street in Shillong and what you’ll see, routinely, are vehicles parked on both sides, sometimes three-deep near the market areas, with narrow gaps left for actual traffic. Nobody gets fined. Or when they do, it’s occasional enough to be treated as bad luck rather than a consequence. The traffic police are understaffed, the roads are ambiguous, and enforcement is wildly inconsistent depending on what part of the city you’re in and who you know.
Shillong inaugurated its first automated multi-level parking facility near the Additional Secretariat. Will it alone ease acute traffic congestion?
Recently Our Chief Minister has informed the House that the State government is planning to shift the Meghalaya Secretariat to its new Complex at Mawkhanu in New Shillong by the end of the next financial year (March 2027?). A big transformation. Are we prepared?
There’s also the question of where everything is concentrated. Police Bazaar, Ïewduh, the Secretariat area — if you need to do anything official or commercial in this city, you’re going to end up in one of three places. That’s a recipe for exactly the kind of gridlock we’re living with. New Shillong Township was supposed to ease this. It hasn’t, not really, mostly because government offices haven’t moved, businesses haven’t followed, and connectivity to the new area is still poor. The idea was right, the follow-through was not.
If more government services moved online — genuinely online, not the current patchwork of half-functional portals — you’d see a measurable drop in the number of people making daily trips to the Secretariat just to submit a form or collect a certificate. This isn’t a bold vision. It’s just catching up to what most Indian cities have managed to do.
Then there’s the tourist question, which locals have complicated feelings about.
Shillong’s popularity has grown enormously over the past decade. More visitors mean more revenue and more exposure for local businesses, and that’s genuinely good. But it also means convoys of tourist buses trying to park on streets that were never designed for them, and private cars from out of state driven by people who have no mental map of the city’s quirks. During Christmas week or the Shillong Autumn Festival, parts of the city become nearly impassable.
Designated parking hubs outside the city centre, with shuttle transport to the main areas, would help. Not revolutionary, just practical. Several tourist-heavy hill towns have done this successfully. The resistance here seems to be partly commercial — vendors near the markets don’t want visitors to park far away — but that short-term thinking is hurting the long-term experience for everyone.
I want to be careful not to fall into the trap of making this all sound like a policy paper with a neat list of solutions. Real change in Shillong will be messier than any checklist. It will require taxi unions to be brought into genuine negotiation rather than being steamrolled or ignored. It will require consistent enforcement that doesn’t let well-connected vehicle owners park wherever they like. It will require politicians to prioritise infrastructure that isn’t visible enough to photograph for an inauguration. And it will require citizens — all of us — to stop treating the traffic as someone else’s problem.
That last part is the hardest. The same people who complain loudest about Shillong’s traffic are often the ones who jump queues at junctions, park on pavements because it’s five minutes more convenient, or oppose any development that might change the character of their neighbourhood.
Urban discipline isn’t a lecture. It’s just what a functioning city requires from its people.
I’m not pessimistic about Shillong. The city still has enormous goodwill from its own residents, and that matters more than any infrastructure plan. People here actually care about this place — its music, its culture, its architecture, its air. That care can translate into civic pressure if it’s pointed in the right direction.
But we’ve been shrugging at this problem for too long. My cousin’s shrug in that traffic jam wasn’t resignation — I know him well enough to know it was frustration wearing a mask. That frustration is widespread and legitimate.
Shillong deserves better than what its roads currently offer. All-weather road?The question is whether anyone in charge is ready to do the boring, difficult, incremental work of actually fixing it, rather than announcing another committee to study it.
The roads won’t widen themselves.
The Hills are calling us. Can we hear?
