Gul Hamad Farooqui
CHITRAL: The construction work on Chitral-Booni-Shandur road has been going on for over four years under the supervision of the National Highway Authority (NHA).
However, the multi-billion project has not only seen unnecessary delays but also quality of work on it is substandard. This is why most of the protection and retaining walls along the road have started falling before completion of the mega project.
The contract of the road construction was awarded to Umar John and Company which sublet it to small contractors. Members of Chitral Development Movement (CDM), a civil society group, allege that the retaining and breast walls on the road towards Chitral river have been built on sandy ground without any foundation. Moreover, the contractors used garbage and pieces of stones inside the protection walls and plastered it with cement from the outside.
Apart from the CDM members, passersby also broke the cement walls with their hands and described it as a very substandard work.
Syed Burhan Shah advocate, social activist Inayatullah Aseer, Muhammad Ashraf, student Kamran, Sultan Mehmood, Zakaria and others while walking on the road expressed their concerns and said in was strange that such a poor quality work was being done on the main road on which the government was spending billions of rupees.
The CDM members also alleged that the consultant resident engineer of National Engineering Services Pakistan did not visit the site even once to check the quality of work. They said this was also brought into the notice of project director of the NHA. In reply, the PD said the consultant was a heart patient and unable to visit the site.
This corespondent tried repeatedly to contact the officials of NHA and NESPAK but got no response from them.
Syed Burhan Shah Advocate and other members of CDM have demanded that the federal government should order an inquiry into the faulty work to ensure the important road is built according to the standards and specification of NHA.
Thank you CDM and chitraltoday.net for highlighting this burning issue of life and death for millions of people of Chitral, Ghizer and Gilgit using the road. The Federal Government are requested to look in to the matter, seriously. We, the people of Yarkhoon Valley of Upper Chitral fully support the Civil Society Organization, Chitral Development Movement, in it’s demand of Enquiry in the case.