Outdated machinery being used for road reconstruction

CHITRAL, Oct 13: The communication and work (C&W) department in Chitral lacks modern machinery and is using a hand-pushed road roller for blacktopping of airport road in the city. The passersby were astonished to see the machine used in the road work, which they said was a cruel joke with the people of Chitral who had been waiting for the repair of the road since long. One of the passersby, Ghufran Khan, said that such hand pushed rollers are used to level the pitch of cricket ground and its use in road blacktopping was quite a bizarre practice.  Another onlooker Irfan Ahmed said that the road was in dilapidated condition and had reduced to ruins because no repair work of the road was carried out for the last two decades. No sub-engineer or any official of the department was found present on the occasion when a team of local media men visited the site on public complaints. A technical persona conversant with road construction said on the occasion that the compression of asphalt material  was so poor that it will hardly last for two months which is further weakened in the winter season. When subdivisional officer Maqbool Azam, holding the dual charge of while the passersby were found making a mockery of it by pronouncing words about it.engineer was contacted, he expressed his ignorance about the use of such roller in the work and said that he will stop it forthwith. The department is without an executive engineer for the last four months while an officer on the post got himself transferred back after only five days in office last week.–Zahiruddin ]]>