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Why Surjit Chowk Must Not Remain a Site of Accidents Waiting to Happen

Team Tangerine walked Rupnagar's Surjit Chowk and uncovered the design and enforcement gaps that keep this junction stuck in a loop of preventable crashes.

7 min readTeam Tangerine, Rupnagar

The site

Surjit Chowk sits at the convergence of three high-volume roads in Rupnagar. Local residents have catalogued crashes here for years. Team Tangerine's audit pulled those informal records into a single document.

What's broken

Three unmarked merges
Drivers improvise their right-of-way every cycle.
No pedestrian phase
Pedestrians cross between vehicle gaps, against vehicle speed.
Faded signage
Stop and yield boards are visually absent at night.

What to fix first

“I have called for ambulances from this corner more times than I have celebrated birthdays.”

— Shopkeeper near Surjit Chowk

Repaint markings
Lane lines, stop bars and zebra crossings in reflective paint.
Signal phasing
Add a dedicated pedestrian phase to the existing controller.
Bollards
Channelise the three merges into ordered flow.
Lighting
Two pole-mounted LEDs to recover night visibility.

Take action

One audit, six fixes

Surjit Chowk's risk is not mysterious. It is documented. It is fixable.

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A Project Rakshak audit of Rupnagar's Surjit Chowk and the interventions it demands.