Road rage

Joined-up thinking is clearly not part of the master plan when it comes to arterial infrastructure in Bahawalpur.


Chris Cork April 16, 2014
The writer is editorial consultant at The Express Tribune, news junkie, bibliophile, cat lover and occasional cyclist

There has never been anything other than a bumpy dirt road to our house in Bahawalpur, but recent years have seen a number of large and very expensive houses built around us –– the owners of which have been applying pressure to those responsible for building roads in the city. Suddenly, early in the morning last Monday, there was a tractor with a dozer blade on the front busy leveling the area –– and not everybody was happy.

For reasons I have never fully understood there is a fashion –– whether it is locally confined, I also know not –– for building houses on elevated plinths; some of them up to three feet in height.

Upon inquiring I was informed that this was to protect the house from floods –– but the area has never flooded in the two decades I have lived hereabouts. There is standing groundwater for a few days after very heavy rain, but there has never been flooding that totally covered the visible surface area that lasted more than a few hours. The land has never become saturated and has always drained well. So the flood-protection plinths appear to be either a case of over-responding to a minimal threat or, more likely, a matter of vanity on the part of the house owner.

What my neighbours had never considered was the possibility that somebody somewhere might put a tick in the box that authorised the budget to build a tarmac road –– and some of them were quickly in trouble.

A consequence of building a plinth in that a ramp is needed for access to the house, especially if you are a car owner. Thus it is that ramps had been built, which encroached on the dirt road, some by several feet.

They looked very glum indeed. The tractor and blade were doing what the contractor had been instructed to do and ramps that overlapped the area to be newly paved were being snipped off by the hour. They stood looking down from the edge of their properties finding a step of a couple of feet where previously there had been their carefully crafted ramps. Very glum indeed.

By Wednesday morning further glumness emerged for all of us as it transpired that the road-building project did not include the laying of sewer lines. Apparently this requires the approval of somebody in the health department and this has yet to be given. We are now faced with the prospect of the road being dug up again in the possibly near future once the necessary approvals for laying sewers comes from the health department. Joined-up thinking is clearly not part of the master plan when it comes to arterial infrastructure in Bahawalpur.

Fast forward 12 hours to Murree Road, Rawalpindi. Murree road for me had always been a bit quaint with its mix of old and new, but that started to disappear with the appearance of the Committee Chowk underpass and was completely obliterated by the time my taxi made an early-morning traverse of it on Wednesday. Joined up thinking was no more a part of development in Rawalpindi than in my own home city.

Just occasionally it is necessary and appropriate to lapse into cliche –– and it is no exaggeration to describe much of Murree Road from Faizabad interchange to far back into the city as a Dantean vision of road-building hell.

My trip was made at 6am when traffic was light and what the same journey must be like in rush hour I shudder to think. Passage is confined to a pair of narrow and congested lanes between which mighty machines are boring and gouging at the construction of what is probably the new Metrobus project, a large camp office for which is at one end of this Hadean vision.

How long this chaos is set to dominate the life of those who live and work along Murree Road or make the daily commute to Islamabad is a mystery. The road outside my house is said –– credibly –– to be finished in a fortnight with or without a sewer line. I can live with that. The best guess I heard for completion of the Metrobus project was a year. I extend my heartfelt sympathies.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 17th, 2014.

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COMMENTS (1)

Parvez | 9 years ago | Reply

Adhocism in planning.......is a sickness that our government has been afflicted with for many, many years. I live in Karachi's Defence are, years back if something was amiss a short visit to meet the Major was all it took to set things right........today you line up in front of a row of computer walas, get a fancy print out........AND THE WORK DOES NOT GET DONE.........and its called progress.

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