The Millennium City drowned yet again on Monday after being lashed by 75 mm of rainfall, leaving it gridlocked for hours after the skies had cleared. The district administration ordered work from home for corporate offices and online classes for schools and colleges from August 25.Rajiv Chowk and Subhash Chowk emerged as the city’s worst flashpoints, with kilometres-long jams pinning down commuters for over an hour at a stretch. The chaos spread quickly along the Signature Tower stretch and the NH-8, bringing traffic on the Delhi-Jaipur Expressway to a standstill. Commute time stretched to over an hour for what is normally a 10 to 15-minute drive. Golf Course Road, the city’s self-styled “Billionaire’s Mile”, was not spared either; its luxury towers appeared to rise out of a flooded street even as social media compared it to Venice.Students bore the brunt as the rain lashed the city just when the schools closed. Several school buses broke down mid-route or were stranded for hours in the flooded gridlock at Subhash Chowk and Rajiv Chowk. As word spread, panicked parents rushed out to locate their children.Many parents reported spending hours navigating the chaos to bring their children home safely, some only arriving after nightfall.Though civic teams claimed to have drained several waterlogged points through the afternoon, the jams refused to ease. Stranded school buses and broken-down vehicles left no room for the traffic to move even after the water had receded.Several stretches remained choked with bumper-to-bumper traffic well into the night.Social media was flooded with visuals of Gurugram’s collapse through the day — people driving tractors through submerged roads to reach police stations, ambulances stranded mid-route and children wading home through murky, waist-deep water alongside their parents. The hashtag — “Jalgram” — trended through the evening, with residents mocking the gap between the city’s Millennium City branding and its monsoon reality.The Gurugram Parent Association said the recurring collapse of the city’s roads during heavy rain had become a yearly ordeal for families. It demanded better real-time coordination between schools and the civic authorities to ensure that children were not left stranded for hours every time it rained.Congress MP Kumari Selja took a dig at the state government on X, calling out the BJP for turning the Millennium City into a “waterlogging city” year after year.MCG Commissioner Pradeep Dahiya and GMDA officials were seen overseeing pumping operations on the ground throughout the evening, even as local public representatives stayed conspicuously absent from the crisis.“We had a strong spell of rain for two hours. The entire civic machinery and the police were on roads to keep the city going. We managed to drain out the water within four hours even as broken-down vehicles posed a challenge,” said Dahiya.