CHITWAN, July 1: Hundreds of passengers have been standard as the Narayanghat-Mugling road remains blocked for the past two days due to landslides. No vehicle passed through the road section on Friday and Saturday. 

The stranded passengers including children and women do not have proper shelter or food as they got stuck on the road which connects the tourist town Pokhara and Kathmandu to the eastern and western regions of the country. With the beginning of the monsoon, landslides have become a common sight on the road point which is being widened for the past two years. 

According to Shiva Khanal, engineer and information officer of the road widening project, clearing of the debris is still going to take time. He said that the lack of enough machines to clear the debris has prolonged the road blockage. “When landslides occur, the debris gets deposited on the road. When we are not able to clear it immediately, vehicles get stuck,” he said. 

The first of the latest landslides on the road occurred at around 8, Friday morning. Before the debris could be cleared, another landslide hit at 1 pm bringing vehicular movement to a halt for two days. There are kilometers-long queues of cars, buses and jeeps on both sides of the landslide site. Khanal said that it might take “some more time” to clear the road, without elaborating on the exact time needed to clear the road.

 
• road obstruction