The Eid-ul-Fitr is forthcoming. Dilapidated roads and highways are jolting the bodies achingly of home-bound festive makers. Nobody is in and around them to see the ruthlessness of the tattered and ramshackle roads and highways.
The tax payers cannot question where their money has gone and why they must suffer for months and years because the roads are badly constructed and thereafter nobody is there to maintain the roads. The contractors cannot be punished because they paid the corruption money. The scenario of dilapidated roads, dugout muddy highways that have remained unattended to for more than a year. The newspaper reports on suffering people were not heeded by the authorities.
Why meaningless urgency being shown, though doing very little over a long period of time, because of Eid festival nearing? The roads and highways are not for use only during festivals.
The Communications Minister Obaidul Quader was and still being seen giving orders to make roads and highways somehow useable. He is also found defending the government strongly. Now he has been rightly saying that even short-cut ways cannot be done to make the roads use worthy before Eid. The question is why his ministry failed to act in time?
The report in The New Nation published on Monday says the deplorable conditions of roads and highways across the country will exist even after Eid, as the repair work of most of the roads cannot be completed before the great festival.
The minister said at least five to six months would be needed to complete the repair work on the highway. Earlier on Thursday, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on the Communications Ministry suggested urgent steps for repair of the roads and highways for the safe journey of the homebound people during the upcoming Eid. The Parliamentary Committee speaks as if the government will care to give any special importance to it. All just publicity. The government itself has its problem of coordination and then funds have been used for purposes unknown to the people.
Meanwhile, transport owners have threatened to go on a transport strike if the repair works of the capital and port city connecting highways is not completed soon.
The government is in power defying the voters. So the government is a more difficult government for proper coordination among different functionaries.
For rains, the 4-lanes of the Dhaka-Chittagong Highway as well as the Dhaka-Mymensingh Highway have been turned into a thick muddy field at several places, resulting in gridlocks everyday lasting hours. No highway police is seen anywhere. They are available after deaths and accidents have taken place.
But otherwise, the most busy Communications Minister only talked and talked but he proved ineffective like any other minister to get things done.
The minister should be frank and explain, not that he is accountable to the people, for his own satisfaction, why he failed to do the job needed to have been done long ago. If he has not been getting necessary cooperation, he should have said so. Now he has to take the blame for doing nothing for so long.
