No respite from habitual delays in public projects
The setbacks facing two projects meant to expand the Dhaka-Sylhet-Tamabil highway would appear familiar, if exasperatingly so by now, to those following the trends of infrastructure development in Bangladesh. According a report by this daily, work on the road corridor—which is part of the Asian Highway-1 linking parts of India to Bangladesh—is being significantly hampered due to issues with land acquisition and the relocation of utility lines. This has led to compensation claims and requests for time extensions by contractors as they, and the taxpayers by extension, face increased costs and inevitable delays in the end because of these issues.
The irony here is that the Roads and Highways Department (RHD) had taken up another project precisely to avoid this scenario. Usually, land acquisition and utility relocation are part of the work of the infrastructure project in question. But the RHD took up the separate project in September 2018 to take care of these preliminary tasks, so that actual work could be started as soon as the expansion projects were approved. That didn't happen. Reportedly, while the Tk-20,500-crore expansion projects were initiated in 2020-2021, the land acquisition project, far from laying the groundwork for those projects, was itself marred by frequent delays. It has been revised twice since, taking its budget from Tk 3,586.04 crore to Tk 7,975.31 crore and deadline from December 2020 to December 2025. This is totally unacceptable.
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So far, for the Dhaka-Sylhet section, only around 60 acres of the required 829.83 acres have been handed over, while no land has been handed over for the Sylhet-Tamabil section yet. While we understand that the process of land acquisition can be complex due to legal and procedural hurdles, the excruciatingly slow pace of work that is on display here is anything but normal. It shows how disorganised, unplanned and uncoordinated the whole undertaking has been. This is not only straining public resources and delaying promised benefits from enhanced connectivity, but also making a mockery of the government's pledge to ensure timely execution of its projects.
We cannot continue to let bureaucratic inefficiencies or corruption, which often complicates matters related to land acquisition, stymie our development trajectory. We urge the higher authorities to take the issue of project delays seriously; such delays and resultant cost overruns have been happening too frequently in government projects. Strict adherence to deadlines and budget plans must be enforced in all its infrastructure projects, and there must be a concerted effort to streamline and expedite the land acquisition process.
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