Senior administrative officials announced that additional police forces will be deployed across the district after May 31.

A massive tourist rush has choked the streets of Shimla as thousands of travellers arrive daily to escape a blistering heatwave sweeping across the northern plains. Local law enforcement data reveals that approximately 631,000 vehicles have entered the popular hill station over the past twenty-four days, including nearly 70,000 arrivals recorded just within the last seventy-two hours.

Official traffic logs show that 370,000 of these vehicles reached the state capital using the busy Chandigarh-Kalka highway. A significant volume of holiday traffic also streamed into the region through alternative entries, including the Bilaspur, Kullu, and Kinnaur routes, with 154,450 cars recorded over the past week alone.

To handle this sudden vehicular pressure, senior administrative officials announced that additional police forces will be deployed across the district after May 31. This deployment will take place immediately after the ongoing local panchayat elections wrap up, helping reinforce current traffic management teams during the peak summer days.

Currently, the police have divided the entire town into five distinct traffic zones, placing a gazetted officer in charge of each sector. To ease severe congestion in the town center, vehicles travelling toward Upper Shimla are being actively diverted through the alternative Shoghi-Mehli bypass route.

While the peak holiday season in Himachal Pradesh normally begins during the first week of June, extreme summer temperatures started the migration much earlier this year. Local authorities have issued urgent appeals asking tourists to follow traffic rules and behave responsibly to prevent total chaos.

(With Inputs from PTI)