Efforts are on to decongest the Circular Road here to ease traffic congestion and to identify stretches facing heavy traffic during peak hours, public works minister Vikramaditya Singh said on Thursday.

Singh took a round of Circular Road, also known as Cart Road, from the state Secretariat along with local MLA Harish Janartha and officials of district administration and municipal corporation.?

He said Shimla is the summer capital of Himachal and facilitating smooth traffic is a dire necessity.?In a statement issued here on Thursday, he said that as per the directions of Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu, efforts would be made to remove the traffic bottlenecks.

Spots would be identified for widening the Circular Road, followed by land acquisition and a committee would be constituted to complete the entire process, he said? He further said that the construction of parking lots, which remained only on paper during the past five years, would be sped up.

The process to make Shimla traffic jam free has been initiated and other important roads would also be made traffic-friendly, he said. Shimla is highly prone to traffic congestion due to several bottlenecks and the problem aggravates and becomes alarming with commuters stranded on the roads during the tourist season as volumes of vehicles swell.