City roads in deplorable state
Crying need for comprehensive action plan
Headlines of our newspaper and a prominent Bangla daily at the weekend screamed: 'City of potholes' and '700 kilometers of Dhaka roads damaged', respectively. Officially, some 30 percent of the thoroughfares is in dire straits while unofficial sources put the figure at 40 percent. Dhaka city corporation has 2,289 kilometers of a road network of which 687 kilometers are so scarred with potholes and trench-like cleavages that they are unfit for use.
The worst part of the ordeal is that in spite of the 60 percent of the roads being in relatively good shape, upwards of 40 percent of bad road patches are stretched all along the network so that its overall function is badly impaired.
This is a ringing indictment on the financial corruption and technological inefficiency plaguing road building and maintenance projects undertaken by the Dhaka city corporation. During the last five years, the DCC has spent more than Tk 2000 crore of development partners' funds, government allocations and their own money on road construction and repair works. The chief engineer of DCC admitted it was not right to say that rains alone were breaking the roads, they would see how far the poor quality work contributed to the brittle roads. Surely, auditing has been long overdue. Usually, the DCC repair the potholes with a rubbish of concrete and a veneer of bitumen with exercise repeated a few times over with splashes of rains.
Chief adviser's intervention has helped rid us of any further road digging scourge in the rainy season. All the same, roads on which excavation work is at the final stages are having to see the finishing touches being given in hot haste. A system has to be worked out whereby the job involving road cutting and earth-filling will have to be completed in winter months.
The conventional road construction technology of bitumen topped layers of soft brick fragments and brick slabs has been replaced by that of blending plastic waste with bitumen to lay roads. We have a huge amount of plastic wastes that can be recycled into road building with a mix of bitumen as standard road construction material. The experiment succeeding in Canada, Brazil and India and in our own country on a trial basis is worth replicating. The overarching good feature is its cost-effectiveness. In maintenance costs alone, the country can save Tk 1507.60 crore a year.
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