3,000 tourist vehicles daily, 2.4 million pilgrims jam Uttarakhand roads

30,000 daily pilgrims choke Badrinath route; visitors stuck for hours

India's Badrinath National Highway (NH-7) near Joshimath is experiencing near-standstill gridlock as 30,000–35,000 daily pilgrims overwhelm the route during peak yatra season, prompting authorities to deploy a token-based gate system and 30-minute batch one-way traffic intervals. The bottleneck is compounded by a 10 km stretch of road severely degraded by past ground subsidence, exposing how chronic infrastructure underinvestment creates cascading failures when demand spikes seasonally.