As the festive spirit of Diwali winds down, highways connecting Pune and Mumbai are witnessing unprecedented traffic snarls. The post-holiday rush sees countless commuters, many of them migrant workers and professionals, returning to the city to resume their routine after visiting their hometowns for the celebrations. The weekend surge, combined with a few detours to popular tourist destinations, has turned travel into a slow crawl on several major routes.

From early Saturday morning, long queues of vehicles were reported on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway, Pune-Bengaluru National Highway, Pune-Nashik Highway, Solapur Road, Nagar Road, and the Hindu Hrudayasamrat Balasaheb Thackeray Maharashtra Samruddhi Mahamarg (Samruddhi Highway). Some stretches, residents noted, took more than an hour to p

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