With only a week remaining before people will start heading towards villages to celebrate Eid-ul-Fitr with their families, Dhaka South City Corporation (DSCC) has failed to keep its promise to repair the busy Gulistan-Jatrabari road.
Jahangir Alam, chief engineer of DSCC, while accompanying Communications Minister Obaidul Quader during a visit there on July 30, had pledged locals to repair the road by the next three days.
But as of Monday, the Gulistan-Jatrabari road was still full of craters causing vehicles to struggle and taking agonisingly long time to cross a small distance.
The most damaged parts of the road lies near Sayedabad bus terminal, in front of Jatrabari wholesale fish market, near the office of Rapid Action Battalion-3 in Tikatuli and Demra intersection.
Coupled with this situation, there is also road-digging by the Dhaka Power Distribution Company (DPDC) which was still going on until Monday. Jillar Rahman, administrator of DSCC, during the visit of the communications minister when locals and transport workers blasted them for the sorry state of the road had assured that the digging by the utility service providers would end by July 31.
Monirul Islam, site supervisor of Sun Rise, the company that is setting 33KV electricity line there for DPDC, said it would take a few more days to complete the work. They still had 400 metres of the 1,300-metre line pending.
He said the battered condition of the road was slowing down the progress.
Since the beginning of the construction of 10-km Gulistan-Jatrabari flyover in June 2012, residents and commuters of the area have been suffering from the battered road. The suffering worsened when four utility service providers altogether started digging the road two months ago, coinciding with the rainy season.
Trucker Ali Hossain, who uses the road every day, said it takes four to five hours to reach the capital from Signboard in Narayanganj which should not take more than 30-40 minutes.
Although the DSCC had been doing some repairing on the road, it did not yield much result as the work was done in smaller scale, said Azad Hossain, a bus driver who plies on Dhaka-Hajiganj (Chandpur) route.
He said the stretch from Sayedabad to Jatrabari takes around one to one and a half hours to pass which should take only 10 minutes for a bus. Taking passengers out of the capital before Eid would be pretty challenging if the road condition did not improve, added the bus driver.
The battered condition of the road has also put an adverse impact on businesses, he said.
“Four round trips a day has been reduced to only one trip nowadays,” said Azad, adding that the number of passengers had also declined thanks to the poor condition of the road.
Mohammad Moni, a pick-up van driver, said his vehicle frequently got damaged due to the bumpy road. “In the last two months, we had to spend around Tk 4,500 on repairing the van.”
About not being able to finish repairing the roads in Jatrabari and Demra, DSCC Chief Engineer Jahangir Alam said rainwater and no way to drain it from the roads had hampered their work.
He said the pervious drainage system fell apart due to the digging by the utility service providers. They were now digging small drains along the road to remove the water and trying to complete the repair work, without carpeting the road, before the Eid rush.
-With The Daily Star input
