Tuhin Shubhra Adhikary

Around one and a half years ago, Dhaka North City Corporation procured three turntable ladders for dousing flames at high-rise buildings.

Transportation of goods from India to Bangladesh via freight trains doubled in the last fiscal year as the route is cost-effective and saves time.

If you have more than one car, SUV or minivan -- be it individually or jointly owned -- you have to pay 50 percent more income tax for each of such vehicles from the current fiscal year.

The Asian Development Bank has managed to award only 27 percent of its mid-year target for contracts and 47 percent of its half-year fund disbursement target as of June 30, in an indication of the magnitude of slowdown in project implementation caused by the pandemic.

Roads and Highways Department (RHD) has failed to start the physical work of a project taken up two years ago for installing 28 axle load control centres despite a call by one of its wings for implementing axle load control on highways ungently to reduce road damages.

At least seven bridges built recently by the Roads and Highways Department in several northern districts have faults, either in alignments or guide banks, which may have adverse impacts on the rivers there, says a government report.

Physical works of 18 major infrastructure projects under the road and rail sectors will continue amid the ongoing seven-day "strict lockdown" aiming to meet their fresh deadlines.

Leaky gas pipes were the fourth most common cause of fires reported last year, according to Fire Service and Civil Defence data.

Although road conditions under Roads and Highways Department network have improved a little compared to the last year, over 3,000km surveyed roads -- 16.26 percent -- are still in “poor, bad or very bad” condition, says an RHD survey.

Bangladesh Bridge Authority (BBA) has decided to raise the toll rate of Bangabandhu Bridge by around 17 percent aiming to boost its income for covering maintenance costs and repaying loans.

Upgradation of Dhaka Bypass Road into a four-lane access-control expressway under the first-ever Public Private Partnership project of Roads and Highways Department (RHD) is finally making progress.

With most of its previous decisions unimplemented, a taskforce, led by Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal, is going to sit for its third meeting today.

The government is planning to find out how many vehicles operate in the capital as well as the capacity of its streets.

The Bangladesh Railway’s abysmal track record in project implementation will continue for a while, it seems.

The government is finally going to fix the economic service life of all commercial vehicles, including buses and trucks, more than two years after a high-powered committee recommended it.

Even though they are quite well paid and receive plenty of perks from the government, a “huge” number of civil servants own and run businesses on the side violating service rules, according to the Anti-Corruption Commission.

Two major railway expansion projects have plunged into uncertainty as China has decided not to finance one of those and the Chinese contractors for both the projects have refused to work following downward revision of the contract prices.

Realising their imminent failure to meet the deadline for early commissioning, the authorities are planning to launch the Uttara-Agargaon metro rail service by December next year.

The mega projects, whose completion are expected to raise Bangladesh’s GDP by as much as 4 percent, got about 48 percent more allocation in the upcoming fiscal year, as part of the government’s push to ensure their timely implementation.

The government has to spend more than 40,000 crore to bring Payra Sea Port in Patuakhali and Barishal under the rail network, a study says.