Road-digging sores all over city anatomy

This capacity for sufferance that they show is often given the spin of a positive attribute called resilience. They have resilience alright in good measure, but no invincibility as such to disgust, which should not be lost on the government. Actually, the ordeals are real hardships suffered mutely out of a sense of resignation. In other cities, the authorities would have had to face open protests.

The case in point is endemic road-digging. By an odd combination of stars, the exercise has hardly ever been taken up in the dry season. But the DCC Mayor had proclaimed early into his tenure that this time excavation work would be avoided during the monsoons. Were we not relieved at the thought of being spared the annual nuisance! How naïve we have been proven on that.

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With road-digging going hammers and tong all around, right in the thick of the rainy season, we not-so-quickly decided to do a scooping investigation into the phenomenon. The resulting report on Wednesday has been startlingly revealing.

As long as 290 kilometres of the capital's roads are in for digging. On the back of 43 excavated points of the network left uncarpeted, Titas Gas, BTTB, WASA and DESA have sought permission from the DCC to dig roads at 100 more points. The DCC has okayed digging or would do so soon at the designated areas through what the mayor called 'one-stop service cell to coordinate road development works'.

What a coordination! In the first place, the exercise has been undertaken at the wrong time, namely, during the rainy season betraying a basic coordination lapse. The unlevelled among the dug up roads have exacerbated the pervasive water-logging in the city primarily caused by a very poor and outmoded drainage system. The onslaught is primarily on the medium-size and narrow inner city roads that serve as by-passes for diversion or dispersal of traffic away from the main thoroughfares. The concomitant traffic congestion, therefore, has reached horrific proportions. As if that was not enough, 100 more roads stretches are going to be excavated with predictably heightened levels of water-logging, poor sanitation and hindrances to public mobility and economic transactions in prospect.

The authorities try to take defense arguing that not all the projects are financed by government; most of them are undertaken on the strength of donor money pledges. The implication is that the untimely digging is linked to delayed disbursement from donors and multi-lateral agencies. The disconnect, we believe, represents planning and coordination failures.

The planning debacle even goes deeper. Why have the roads to be cut up year after year; sometimes even within a span of few months? Isn't there any perspective plan? A free-for-all is the other name for corruption.

We demand a thorough investigation into these planning, administrative and management debacles that have had people frequently ask the question: who governs the city? Has it become the happy hunting ground for corrupt officials, engineers and contractors who are trading unabashedly on the miseries of the citizens?

We ask a hitherto unasked question: do the DCC engineers follow any building code while constructing the city roads? We raise this point for the simple reason that many of our highways are of world class while the metropolitan streets are evidently of a very poor standard. What roads are we using in the capital city, the gateway to Bangladesh!

As it is, our road network is only eight per cent of the total city area which is at least four to eight per cent below the world standard. That's why the traffic jam we face. And, if the roads go derelict by frequent excavations, space being a fixed factor, what a terrible state of affairs stares in the face of future city transportation!