Staff Reporter :Tailbacks on the highways have posed a threat to thousands of homebound people on the eve of Durga Puja and Eid-ul Azha festivals turning their happy journey into a nightmare.Usually, most of the national and regional highways face severe gridlock in the normal situation where people have to remain stuck on vehicles for several hours. But at present, the situation has deteriorated more as additional number of vehicles started rolling on the roads during the festivals. Besides, frequent accidents, roadside makeshift cattle markets and lack of police vigilance have made the situation worse. The condition of Dhaka-Chittagong highway, the lifeline of the country, is simply miserable. Passengers suffered a lot even on Wednesday due to about 50 km long tailback, which stretched from Daudkandi to Alekha Char, following a road accident near Palki Cinema at Chandina upazila.Witnesses said the accident disrupted traffic and also caused immense suffering to the commuters on buses and cars, and traders on cattle-laden trucks coming and going from both the sides.”A Dhaka-bound bus of Eagle Paribahan and a covered van collided head-on near Palki Cinema around 3.00am yesterday. Following the accident, several hundred vehicles were stranded on both sides,” Sohel Ahmed, officer-in-charge of Moynamati Highway Police Station, said.”Although the accident-hit vehicles were removed from the highway after one hour, the traffic congestion turned severe again after another lorry went out of order near gate-1 of the Comilla Cantonment,” the OC said.The passengers, especially women and children, went through an agonising ordeal as they sat for hours with no room to stretch their legs and almost no access to drinking water, food and toilet, the witnesses said.Sergeant Mehadi Hasan of the Daudkandi Highway Police Outpost said, “The traffic situation on the highway has taken a serious turn. The traffic gridlock became acute after two trucks had gone inoperative on the Gomti Bridge in Daudkandi.”Meanwhile, the Dhaka-Sylhet, Dhaka-Moulvibazar, Dhaka-Habiganj, Dhaka-Cox’s Bazar, Dhaka-Feni and Dhaka-Noakhali are also facing severe gridlock due to numerous potholes and cracks, according to sufferers. They said the condition of long-distance North Bengal national highway Dhaka- Rangpur -Dinajpur- is also awful. Heavy rainfall for last few days created numerous potholes to make the travel of lakhs of people extremely painful. Not only that the condition of some regional highways like Dhaka-Kishoreganj, Dhaka-Comilla, Dhaka- Mymensingh and Dhaka-Narsingdi is really miserable where severe gridlock is a common sight almost everyday. Official sources said the Roads and Highways Department [RHD] is now undertaking temporary repair works to keep the roads and highways worthy of travel ahead of Eid.But concerned circles apprehended that this type of piecemeal maintenance work would collapse if there were heavy rainfalls. “Of the highways, the condition of North Bengal road is little bad now. But, we will make it ‘useable’ before the Eid ul Azha. Apart from it, the RHD has taken up a programme to keep the country’s highways, including Dhaka-Chittagong, travel worthy,” Chief Engineer of RHD, Md Feroz Iqbal, told The New Nation yesterday.Iqbal, however, admitted that the RHD is now doing simple maintenance work in the highways just to overcome the Eid challenge. “It’s a temporary maintenance work… We have taken a decision to carry out massive repairing works after the end of the rainy season,” he said. “We hope it will work. Road repairing is a continuous process and we have also formed mobile teams to observe the condition of roads,” he said when asked whether the present maintenance work is sufficient to absorb the pressure of increasing vehicles on the highways.
