Agitation against shelving of Shandur road project soon

BOONI: Public protest will be launched soon against reported shelving of the Chitral-Shandur road project by the National Highway Authority (NHA), said Tehreek Huqook-Awam leader Muhammad Pervez Lal.

He said that last year the NHA contractors had started widening of the 153km road at different points both in Lower and Upper Chitral and also removed the tar coal laid by a Chinese company over two decades ago from Chitral town to Booni. 

Social media users of Chitral reported that the federal government had shelved the mega project which was approved by Executive Committee of the National Economic Council (ECNEC) last year.

The project was scheduled to be completed in 36 months while the revised project envisaged construction of 153-km-long two–lane single carriageway starting from Chitral city, passing through the towns of Booni and Mastuj and ending near Shandur at the border of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit-Baltistan. 

Pervez Lal said that when the NHA contractor was removing the tar coal from the road, the Tehreek activists stopped his workers not to damage the portion of the road between Booni and Kuragh. From Kuragh down the Chital city the metalled road was dug out and left unrepaired. As a result, now it has developed potholes and ditches and commuters take over four hours to reach Chitral town from Booni and vise versa.

Instead of constructing the road as planned, the federal government even damaged the metalled road and now altogether shelved the entire project. People of Upper Chitral will soon launch a public agitation against the callous attitude of the government towards them, he warned.