On a day when the entire vehicular traffic came to a grinding halt, the Pune division of the Central Railway was caught napping as thousands of commuters risked their life on jam-packed local trains. No arrangements were made to run additional local trains; neither was any thought given to ease commuters' travails on a day when lakhs of warkaris descended in the city. Equally at fault was the Pune Mahanagar Parivahan Mahamandal Ltd as it did not deem it fit to seek help from the railways.

Officials of the Central Railway remained clueless as commuters slugged it out. “If a proposal to run extra local trains had come from the transport undertaking, we would have thought about it," divisional railway manager Prabhat Sahay said when asked whether the PMPML had made any request to them to take care of commuters. On whether the railways should have taken any such initiative on their own, Sahay merely said the railways work as per its schedule.

PMPML chairman and managing director Nitin Khade said he was not aware whether the transport undertaking has made any such request and said he was not in town. PMPML traffic manager Sunil Gawli confirmed that no such request has been made.

The PMPML bus services ground to a halt on the day and when thousands of city commuters rushed to railway stations on the Pune-Lonavala section, they too were choc-a-block. Anxious passengers could be seen trying to board trains to places like Dehu Road, Akurdi, Pimpri, Chinchwad, Khadki and Shivaji Nagar where they would have, on a normal day, gone by road.

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