Frequent traffic jams have made 4 life miserable for the city's inadequately equipped traffic branch. The worst snarls are at Radhika Road-ST bus terminus junction and Powai Naka.What Satara lacks is a master plan to accommodate the growing traffic. The roads built decades ago are growing narrow to accommodate the burgeoning vehicular traffic. Encroachments are eating into the roads.

Regarded as a pensioner's abode till recently, Satara today is an urban city that is fast expanding. Once a town of a moderate 50,000 people it has crossed the two lakh population mark. Besides its infrastructure caters to about 4,000 autorickshaws and more than twice that number of two-wheelers and private vehicles.

Interestingly, traffic plans were seldom thought of. The steps taken in the past towards managing the traffic have time and again proved to be the makeshift arrangements. The city planners have been mute spectators to the scenario.

The Radhika Road-Market Yard junction witnesses major choke-ups despite steps taken by the traffic police. Signals installed at this junction proved futile as it added to the chaos, many feel.

Land near Shivaji Museum and the Market Yard building for an island could be acquired, opening Radhika Road for two-way traffic which could serve as an alternate link to the currently congested Rajwada-Powai Naka Road.

Sealing the narrow Market Yard end of Radhika Road for city-bound traffic and diverting it to Radhika Road from a lane adjacent to the telegraph office could provide an immediate relief, if construction of a traffic island and road widening were to take time, some citizens feel. Officials have welcomed the suggestion of the traffic island but say acquiring of land and making a road are the municipality's jobs. The managers of the cash-strapped Satara Municipal Council on the other hand are busy blaming the State Government for not extending a helping hand by sanctiong additional funds.

Always controlled by pro-Congress politicians, the Satara municipality has met with step-motherly treatment from the saffron alliance government, they feel. The city's development has been hampered in last three to four years, a senior corporator said. ``The picture will be reversed,'' he hoped with an oblique reference to the political turmoil in the civic corridors.

Raising funds and providing basic infrastructure to the tax-payers have been the municipality's responsibility and it cannot not wash its hands by pushing the blame, he admitted.