STUDENTS' CORNER - 223

Challenges faced in maintaining roads

Transport of freight and passengers has become inevitable today, personally and professionally; personally in the sense one has to go to the place of work or one has to go to market to get things needed for everyday routine. Business is the key word today; everybody is in it in one way or another and business activity heavily depends on movement of things and persons.  In all countries the road network keeps growing.  In other words, transport by air, sea and land has become integral to our living.  Used roads get worn out and also become damaged. Maintenance of roads cannot be ignored in the interest of both comfort and commerce.

Funding the maintenance of the road network looms large as a primary problem in maintaining roads. The governments try many strategies to face out the funding issue of the roads maintenance and the most popular one is use of contractors. Of course it has not been found very useful in the sense that many contracts remain incomplete despite bank loans; banks normally do not hesitate to sanction loans if a contractor produces government approval for his contract. But it is unfortunate that many contracts do not get completed though the approved and sanctioned funds have been exhausted in the work which remains incomplete. The end result is the money spent remains sunk money with no use for the public.

 Projects are conceived and designed for the benefit of the public only but incomplete projects deprive the public of the advantages which the project envisaged. Of course lot of studies have been conducted to find out the reasons for the failure of the projects and the results only prove that unfair exploitation of the privilege by the authorities , the contractors  and so on. 

Toll gates are strategic device to generate funds for the maintenance of the roads.  Whatever may be the source of revenue, strict monitoring is required so that the waste of money—in the form of corruption, misappropriation etc.—can be minimal.

Simply, roads are silent assets for the citizens, the contractors, the transporters of all kinds and the assets demand careful maintenance and discreet use. If roads are not properly used and maintained for whatever reasons, the losers are the people in the form of accidents or of cost hikes.  Roads like assets must be sustained like businesses and even human relationships through fair and relevant use.

We will see some more points in the maintenance of roads in our next and be done with it because the subject is as long as any national highways can be.