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The much awaited 48-kilometre Dhaka bypass road is expected to be opened to traffic within the next two months but the experts are apprehending that a large part of the road will become seriously uneven because of inadequate compaction of soil, reports BSS.
"We have reports that some irregularities have been found in the construction work but we are keen to open the road to traffic within next June," Additional Chief Engineer of the Roads and Highways Department (RHD) (Dhaka Zone) Khandakar Nurul Arefin said.
The RHD has formed a technical committee comprising three BUET professors three months back to probe the irregularities but it could not submit the report yet because of lack of necessary documents.
Chief of the committee, BUET's Civil Engineer Prof Alamgir Muzibul Haque, said they have submitted a proposal to the RHD for investigating the technical faults in the construction of the bypass road from Gazipur to Narayanganj but they have not yet received any official letter to conduct the inspection.
According to sources, the uneven surface has already emerged on four kilometres of the bypass road where traffic has started moving unofficially. The RHD officials estimated that repair of the damaged road may cost Tk 250 million (25 crore) before its formal opening.
The bypass road started at Joydevpur and stretched via Bhulta and Kanchan through Chittagong Highway at Madanpur, connecting the Sylhet National Highway, Dhaka Zone Executive Engineer Safiul Azam Bhuiyan said.
The four-kilometre road from Bhulta to Kanchan has already developed serious uneven surface as the road sinks on less compacted soil. Former executive engineer of Narayanganj division Nazmul Haque said due to last year's flood the soil was washed away from the shoulder of the road.
"This is neither a technical fault nor administrative irregularities, this is a regular phenomena for our RHD projects, and just a thick layer of pitch could solve the problem," he added.
But another engineer of the project preferring anonymity said it's a technical fault, because there was no provision for scientific soil compaction, and without reconstruction traffic on the road is not going to move smoothly.
According to the BUET technical committee, there are problems in soil compaction as well as in construction work due to unnecessary involvement of too many contractors for the construction.
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