Support for separate road maintenance authority

The absence of regular road maintenance activities alone costs the country in the neighbourhood of $1.0 million every day, in terms of the depreciated value of the roads from wearing and tearing. No estimate is, however, available for the compound loss that occurs from slowed-down movements of vehicles, depreciation of vehicles from moving on pot-holed surfaces, delays caused to businesses from inability to reach goods in time, etc. But these estimates, if taken for a given period of time, would very likely to show up a huge figure. In this connection, the views expressed in this column by one contributor to the FE, have drawn our attention. The points made by him in favour of creating a separate road maintenance fund, to be administered by an autonomous authority, merit serious consideration. We entirely endorse this view that proper road maintenance needs to be ensured through proper plans and their implementation for competitive and cost-efficient operation of the economy. If the government sets up a separate 'road fund' with adequate allocation of budgetary resources, coordinated activities can be undertaken to ensure better and proper maintenance of roads. An independent authority, vested with the responsibility of administering this fund, can help overcome the knotty problems of bureaucracies for coordinating activities among different bodies, delays and corruption. The road maintenance fund can also be beefed up by raising greater resources from road-users through direct fees, tolls, licence fees, etc. The operationalisation of such a road maintenance fund, to be administered by an independent autonomous body, can, furthermore, help raise the capacity to undertake immediate works on detection of poor road surfaces or even anticipatory advanced works on this ground. The road-users can also be made then better responsible, in one way or other, by actually discouraging at field-level overloading that leads to faster crumbling of the roads. Tauhid Anwar Nakhalpara, Tejgaon Dhaka.