Munima Sultana
The road survey capacity of the Roads and Highways Department (RHD) is likely to increase after changing its manual survey system to a digital one, sources said.
They said the RHD has introduced the new system after procuring the Leisure Profile Meter (LPM), which will help it to measure roughness of the roads more accurately than ever.
"It has facilitated the department to upgrade its system to ensure accurate treatment on the damaged portion of roads," said an official concerned.
He said the technology will help the RHD to prepare roughness index, showing both improvement and deterioration of the roads with in-depth data.
Every year, the RHD comes under fire for continuous damage of the roads and highways in the country even after carrying regular maintenance work.
Though its budget for the periodical maintenance work is increasing every year, people's sufferings due to the deplorable road condition have not reduced, the sources opined.
The Highway Development Management (HDM) Unit of the department assesses condition of the roads and highways.
The HDM categorises those as bad, good and worse through conducting surveys on its 22,000-kilometre road network every year.
This, however, does not ensure improvement of the road condition, which was found severely damaged in the previous surveys.
The sources further said the RHD hardly follows the previous year's report while distributing maintenance budget according to the category of road condition.
However, the RHD officials, defending these allegations, said it is not possible for the department to improve the road condition even with an increased budget.
They also said it happens, as backlog in the road sections increases multiple times.
In this regard, they showed the example that the survey report of 2017 placed a demand of Tk 120 billion to make the damaged roads fit. But the RHD received only Tk 17 billion for road maintenance.
The officials, meanwhile, said the new LPM will help them identify the accurate level of cracks or potholes of the roads.
So treatment of the damaged roads will be more sustainable than the previous years, they added.
The RHD brought the LPM from New Zealand under the Asian Development Bank (ADB)-funded SASEC project.
The equipment will fit into the survey vehicles to collect data on 13 features through leisure crack measurement system.
The LPM will replace its previous road maintenance management system, which was carried through Roughmeter-3.
The HDM developed its first data collection system in 2004 with the support of the World Bank.
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