June 4, 2002	Tuesday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 22,1423

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ISLAMABAD, June 3: The National Highway Authority has demanded of the finance ministry to allocate Rs34 billion in budget for building roads including reviving the motorway policy, which the Musharraf government had abandoned two years ago, calling it a ‘luxury’ which Pakistan could not afford.

The amount requested would be spent on the mega projects like Peshawar-Islamabad Motorway (M1), Pindi-Bhatian to Faisalabad Motorway, Coastal Highway, Dual Carriageway to Murree, and Faisalabad to Multan Motorway.

The government, abandoning the motorway policy, had announced it would build roads on priority, but not motorways which, it termed, elite roads.

The motorway is a fenced road, and it also divides the area from where it passes, creating various problems for the residents who still relied on primitive means of communication, including donkeys.

NHA Chairman Maj-Gen Farrukh Javed, in reply to a question at a recent press conference, defended the revival of the motorway policy, saying that Pakistan required quality roads.

He, however, disagreed with the questioner that motorway was a luxury road, meant for the elite of the country. Another official of the NHA, sitting besides the chairman, however, confirmed that the cost of motorway was equal to four roads of the same width and length.

An official of the Ministry of Communication, who had witnessed the making of motorway policy since early nineties, believed that some officials in the present set-up were again pushing for the revival of motorway policy to mint money.

Pakistan’s experience of building motorway is not pleasant and the Islamabad-Lahore Motorway, which was built with a cost of Rs64 billion, was not earning enough to meet its expenses incurred on the maintenance and police security services.

The official pointed out that the motorway, which was dubbed as road to prosperity, had become a liability.

When the government decided to award contract to Daewoo of Korea in 1991, the communication ministry informed the higher authorities that Pakistan had the lowest traffic volume in the region, and that making motorway would be the wastage of resources.

India which could afford this type of plans has not so far built a motorway, and had shelved the plan of building a motorway from Bombay to Broada, saying that the country needed roads, not motorways on which few rich could run their motors, the official said.

He also said the country possessed only 3.4 million vehicles for 140 million Pakistanis. The funds earmarked for motorway would be sufficient to complete the existing road network, he commented.