pune the show of strength of the maharashtra rajya saraf suvarnakar federation on thursday stalled traffic in the core city areas leaving commuters stranded for hoursbumpertobumper traffic road closures and diversions on roads around the rally route from vijay talkies on laxmi road to sspms grounds on wellesley road via mg road in pune camp gave patience test to commuters the rally started at 10am and ended around 130pm but its cascading effect lasted beyond 430pm for most of the morning vehicles were forced to crawl along laxmi road mg road pune camp pune railway station sadhu vaswani chowk sassoon road moledina road bund garden road boat club road and the peth areas at many roundabouts the traffic police deployed constables to manually manage the vehicular movement most of them were temporarily closed for vehicles to let the rally of more than two lakh protesters pass through the afternoon heat only made matters worse for commuters describing his ordeal mahendra phatak who was headed to the pune regional transport office said i spent more than 40 minutes for a journey which should not take more than 10 minutessonali waikar who was returning home with her daughter said the heat is too much for the child to bear after school i got stuck at the sadhu vaswani roundabout for more than 20 minutes as roads around it were closedthe city police commissioner k k pathak was not spared from the traffic chaos his vehicle stopped on the raja bahadur mill road because of haphazard parking of vehicles by the jewellers participating in the rally pathak told toi the jewellery shop owners had parked their vehicles on footpaths and on roadsit caused inconvenience to road users i ordered the traffic branch to file cases against the errant vehicle owners my men cleared the traffic to allow my vehicle to move he saidadmitting that commuters were inconvenienced sarang awad deputy commissioner of police traffic said we had made arrangements for the rally but it went on for a longer time than we had anticipated because of sheer number of participants the rally organizers had also been pulled for overstepping its permission time dcp tushar doshi said we have charged the organizers under the section 134 of the police act for flouting the permission given their rally was permitted only from 10am to 11am but it continued for hours beyond that he said