PESHAWAR, Aug 3: There is a need for an all-weather road connecting Chitral with other areas of the NWFP to ease travelling problems.

This was stated by passengers, who had been turned away from Peshawar airport after their flight was cancelled for the fourth consecutive day because of bad weather.

Some of the passengers complained about the government’s neglect in this regard, they said that the Lowari tunnel should be completed without any delay.

Chitral, the largest district of the NWFP, remains cut off from the rest of the province for over half a year between November and May because of the heavy snowfall in the region.

Secretary-general of the Chitral Journalists Forum Zulfiqar Chitrali, who was among the returning passengers, said that if the local leaders been foresighted, they should have made the construction of the Lowari Tunnel conditional with the area’s accession to Pakistan at the time of the partition of the sub- continent in 1947.

He said that the construction of an all-weather route between CHitral and other areas of the province had been a life-long dream of the people of the district.

Reminiscing the history of the road project, he said that the construction of the mega project had been initiated during the government of late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1974 but the work had been abandoned by the Ziaul Haq regime in its bid to reverse all policies adopted by the then elected prime minister.

He said that President Gen Pervez Musharraf and NWFP Governor Syed Iftikhar Hussain Shah were taking keen interest in the early completion of the project but it remained far from being completed in the near future.

The people, he said, were dissatisfied in this regard.

The people of Chitral, he said, faced great difficulties during the six months in winter, adding that even in summer, flights were routinely cancelled because of weather problems.—PPI