The second Dhaka-Chittagong highway
Sunday, 23 September 2007
The business community has been demanding for long the construction of another highway linking Dhaka with Chittagong for easier and faster transportation of import and export cargoes to and from the Chittagong port, the lifeline of the country's economy. The past governments did recognise the need for the second highway but they were not that proactive towards taking up the project with an estimated cost of about 900 million dollars. However, the immediate past BNP-led alliance government in the final year of its tenure in 2006 accepted an unsolicited offer from a Malaysian consortium for the construction of the second highway. But the offer was allegedly accepted in violation of the government's own private infrastructure guidelines.
The guidelines, according to a report published in this paper last Saturday, do not approve of single-investor offer for any government-approved infrastructure project to be developed by private investors. Such violations in the implementation of development projects had been galore during the period of the past governments because of the massive inroad of corruption and other irregularities at all tiers of the government. The ongoing anti-graft drive under the interim administration has only exposed the tip of the iceberg. The present administration will have to renege on its promise of holding general elections for transferring power to an elected government by the end of next year and continue for some more years only if it decided to dig deep into the irregularities in various government projects, particularly the big ones. That seems very unlikely and scores of development project-related scams would remain buried under the heaps of files in government offices.
The present government, however, has decided to select a private consortium through international bidding within the current financial year to make the act of awarding of the contract of such an expensive as well as important development project under build-own-operate and transfer (BOOT) arrangement transparent. The Manila-based multilateral lending agency, the Asian Development Bank, has already commissioned a consultancy firm to conduct feasibility study on the four-lane highway that would reduce distance between Dhaka and Chittagong by 60 kilometres, making the journey between the two cities shorter by two to three hours.
However, if past experience is any guide, the implementation of big infrastructure projects is very much prone to delays and overshooting of original costs because of problems of different nature. In case of road projects, the most important hurdle that the government does often encounter is the acquisition of private lands. Though the government is armed with a law to acquire private land against the payment of due compensation to the aggrieved owners, it often becomes really difficult to enforce the same. The present government is unlikely to see the physical implementation of the project because of the time constraint but everyone would expect that it would make an auspicious beginning of the second Dhaka-Chittagong highway project through the selection of a sound and adequately qualified private consortium in a transparent method. It is the bidding process-local or international-that in the past was found to be one of the major areas exploited by the corrupt politicians, bureaucrats and businesses to amass wealth that they are now finding difficult to hide. However, there is no guarantee that the evil practice would not stage a comeback under the next elected government.
The guidelines, according to a report published in this paper last Saturday, do not approve of single-investor offer for any government-approved infrastructure project to be developed by private investors. Such violations in the implementation of development projects had been galore during the period of the past governments because of the massive inroad of corruption and other irregularities at all tiers of the government. The ongoing anti-graft drive under the interim administration has only exposed the tip of the iceberg. The present administration will have to renege on its promise of holding general elections for transferring power to an elected government by the end of next year and continue for some more years only if it decided to dig deep into the irregularities in various government projects, particularly the big ones. That seems very unlikely and scores of development project-related scams would remain buried under the heaps of files in government offices.
The present government, however, has decided to select a private consortium through international bidding within the current financial year to make the act of awarding of the contract of such an expensive as well as important development project under build-own-operate and transfer (BOOT) arrangement transparent. The Manila-based multilateral lending agency, the Asian Development Bank, has already commissioned a consultancy firm to conduct feasibility study on the four-lane highway that would reduce distance between Dhaka and Chittagong by 60 kilometres, making the journey between the two cities shorter by two to three hours.
However, if past experience is any guide, the implementation of big infrastructure projects is very much prone to delays and overshooting of original costs because of problems of different nature. In case of road projects, the most important hurdle that the government does often encounter is the acquisition of private lands. Though the government is armed with a law to acquire private land against the payment of due compensation to the aggrieved owners, it often becomes really difficult to enforce the same. The present government is unlikely to see the physical implementation of the project because of the time constraint but everyone would expect that it would make an auspicious beginning of the second Dhaka-Chittagong highway project through the selection of a sound and adequately qualified private consortium in a transparent method. It is the bidding process-local or international-that in the past was found to be one of the major areas exploited by the corrupt politicians, bureaucrats and businesses to amass wealth that they are now finding difficult to hide. However, there is no guarantee that the evil practice would not stage a comeback under the next elected government.