Our Correspondent
CHATTOGRAM, Sept 29: A newly-constructed road has created the possibility for selling produce of hill people and road communication to tens of thousands of villagers in the remote southeast region.
The ten-kilometre road, opened to traffic recently, has connected Satkania upazila of Chattogram district with Lama upazila of Bandarban hill district.
The road, inaugurated by Road Transport and Bridges Minister Obaidul Quader, has opened up huge economic, educational, connectivity and different other development opportunities for the people of the area, especially inhabitants of 16 villages under Chunati and Putibila unions of Satkania upazila.
Locals said hundreds of people from the Lama-Bandarban hilly region have started selling vegetables, fruits, firewood and other forest-grown produce to the people of plain lands and are earning a lot now.
They said the villages, situated in dense forest produce a large quantity of different kinds of fruits including mango, jackfruit, pineapple and vegetables throughout the year.
But a large quantity of these produces used to get rotten due to lack of marketing and processing facilities, and in absence of road communications between the hill and the plain areas of the remote region.
Direct road communication has also been established not only for the traders and the entrepreneurs of those villages but also for the students, especially the school-going children who used to walk miles to reach their respective educational institutions treading narrow footways in absence of concrete roads and transport facility.
Apart from the educational institutions, there are a good number of mosques, mazars, monasteries (Buddhist temple) and Hindu temples, and rubber dam projects used by people during the religious festivals.
An engineer at the Local Government Engineering Department (LGED) said the department has constructed the road under the Rural Transport Improvement Project-2 at a cost of Tk 206.3 million funded by the government and the World Bank.
The 24-feet wide road with five bridges and 19 culverts has been named as Ishaq Meah Road.
As an elected peoples' representative of the area, Md Ishaq Meah, father of Major General Meah Md Zainul Abedin (Bir Bikram), worked to spread education for children.
Major General Zainul Abedin is military secretary to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.
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