That’s the lead news of the October 14 edition of The Financial Express. The Chinese contractor in charge of the four-lane highway from Dhaka to Chittagong has managed to construct 7.5km out of 140km over the last 20 months. The fact that the company has been experiencing financial difficulty seems to have eluded Roads and Highways Department officials during this period. It is interesting to say the least. Needless to say, the expansion of this crucial highway is of immense importance to the economy.
The total length of the highway stands at 192km with majority portion of work awarded to Sino Hydro. Going by what has been published in the press, the other two local companies appear to be on track with their portion of work on the highway. Sino Hydro was given three years from January 2011 to complete their work but already the firm has sought an extension up to March 2015 to complete the project. Precisely how a 15-month extension will allow the project to be completed when three years had elapsed and work completion rate stands at slightly above 5 per cent is of course, open to speculation.
What is apparent is that precious time was lost because the government wasted valuable time for land acquisition — an essential prerequisite to any such expansion work. We are told that the company has completed about 85 per cent work on earthwork, but the project is in limbo due to the company’s financial constraints. However, the land acquisition delay has taken its toll on the satisfactory progress of the overall project. We can also surmise that not only the difficulties faced in land acquisition, but also timely placement of funds from Bangladesh side for land acquisition has played its part in the delay.
Indeed the 4-lane expansion of the Dhaka-Chittagong highway is part of a much bigger picture. As pointed out in a report published by The Financial Express on February 27 “The South Asia Sub-regional Economic Cooperation (SASEC) under its Road Connectivity Project identified Bangladesh’s geographical location and importance for the N4 four-lane highway regarding regional connectivity between Bangladesh and India-Nepal-Bhutan-SW Kunming of China. The N4 highway is an important part of the Asian Highway 2 and also of Sub-regional Highway Corridor 4 and 8…The proposed Joydevpur-Chandra-Tangail-Elenga 4-lane project (existing 2-lane) which started from the Jamuna Bridge approach road will be connected with the Dhaka-Chittagong 4-lane highway at the Kanchpur Bridge point.”
Given this backdrop, it remains unclear how the government failed to prioritise work on the Dhaka-Chittagong highway. It is actually not too difficult to imagine why work on the highway got derailed. This is, after all, “election year”. And as tradition has it, in every election year, tons of “political” projects get priority. While such projects are certainly very visible and considered vote-winners, the fact that they get priority over nationally-important projects is a failure of planning at the national stage. Again, as per newspaper reports, news of exerting undue pressure on the Planning Commission surfaced in August that an unsanctioned project that proposed construction of a railway line overpass in Comilla was being pursued that would cost the national exchequer an estimated Tk510million. Similarly, another railway construction project in Brahmanbaria was proposed at a cost of Tk740million.
At the end of the day, what all this boils down to is that while the government was facing serious difficulty in meeting funding for the Tk31.29billion, parliamentarians were busy trying to convince the Planning Commission, Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Communications to make financial allocation and other resources available for projects that had less merit in the Annual Development Plan. But then, this is election year. And we come back full circle to realities on the ground which means that the electorate must be convinced that their respective lawmakers have done their bit for the old country. In the midst of all this lobbying, the government is beset with the problems of financing projects that are part of the plan, which include amongst others the Dhaka-Chittagong 4-lane road construction. In the meantime, the allotted time of three years has passed and we are hoping that the work will now be completed within the stipulated extension time, i.e. March 2015. We are uncertain about the certainty of the project being completed within the extended timeframe primarily because of one reason.
Our past experience tells us that should there be a change in the government, development projects initiated by the preceding government come to an abrupt halt (for any multitude of reasons) for months, even years. This culture of halting vital infrastructure development projects has been a common practice of both parties that have led the country since democracy was restored in 1991. And it has been a disastrous policy. One can only hope that a repetition of mistakes committed in the past will not be committed in the future. In the event that this project is derailed, then the whole question of Bangladesh’s participation in the “Asian Highway” plan will be set back, perhaps permanently.
The total length of the highway stands at 192km with majority portion of work awarded to Sino Hydro. Going by what has been published in the press, the other two local companies appear to be on track with their portion of work on the highway. Sino Hydro was given three years from January 2011 to complete their work but already the firm has sought an extension up to March 2015 to complete the project. Precisely how a 15-month extension will allow the project to be completed when three years had elapsed and work completion rate stands at slightly above 5 per cent is of course, open to speculation.
What is apparent is that precious time was lost because the government wasted valuable time for land acquisition — an essential prerequisite to any such expansion work. We are told that the company has completed about 85 per cent work on earthwork, but the project is in limbo due to the company’s financial constraints. However, the land acquisition delay has taken its toll on the satisfactory progress of the overall project. We can also surmise that not only the difficulties faced in land acquisition, but also timely placement of funds from Bangladesh side for land acquisition has played its part in the delay.
Indeed the 4-lane expansion of the Dhaka-Chittagong highway is part of a much bigger picture. As pointed out in a report published by The Financial Express on February 27 “The South Asia Sub-regional Economic Cooperation (SASEC) under its Road Connectivity Project identified Bangladesh’s geographical location and importance for the N4 four-lane highway regarding regional connectivity between Bangladesh and India-Nepal-Bhutan-SW Kunming of China. The N4 highway is an important part of the Asian Highway 2 and also of Sub-regional Highway Corridor 4 and 8…The proposed Joydevpur-Chandra-Tangail-Elenga 4-lane project (existing 2-lane) which started from the Jamuna Bridge approach road will be connected with the Dhaka-Chittagong 4-lane highway at the Kanchpur Bridge point.”
Given this backdrop, it remains unclear how the government failed to prioritise work on the Dhaka-Chittagong highway. It is actually not too difficult to imagine why work on the highway got derailed. This is, after all, “election year”. And as tradition has it, in every election year, tons of “political” projects get priority. While such projects are certainly very visible and considered vote-winners, the fact that they get priority over nationally-important projects is a failure of planning at the national stage. Again, as per newspaper reports, news of exerting undue pressure on the Planning Commission surfaced in August that an unsanctioned project that proposed construction of a railway line overpass in Comilla was being pursued that would cost the national exchequer an estimated Tk510million. Similarly, another railway construction project in Brahmanbaria was proposed at a cost of Tk740million.
At the end of the day, what all this boils down to is that while the government was facing serious difficulty in meeting funding for the Tk31.29billion, parliamentarians were busy trying to convince the Planning Commission, Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Communications to make financial allocation and other resources available for projects that had less merit in the Annual Development Plan. But then, this is election year. And we come back full circle to realities on the ground which means that the electorate must be convinced that their respective lawmakers have done their bit for the old country. In the midst of all this lobbying, the government is beset with the problems of financing projects that are part of the plan, which include amongst others the Dhaka-Chittagong 4-lane road construction. In the meantime, the allotted time of three years has passed and we are hoping that the work will now be completed within the stipulated extension time, i.e. March 2015. We are uncertain about the certainty of the project being completed within the extended timeframe primarily because of one reason.
Our past experience tells us that should there be a change in the government, development projects initiated by the preceding government come to an abrupt halt (for any multitude of reasons) for months, even years. This culture of halting vital infrastructure development projects has been a common practice of both parties that have led the country since democracy was restored in 1991. And it has been a disastrous policy. One can only hope that a repetition of mistakes committed in the past will not be committed in the future. In the event that this project is derailed, then the whole question of Bangladesh’s participation in the “Asian Highway” plan will be set back, perhaps permanently.
No comments:
Post a Comment