KOHAT: The new Kohat-Hangu highway is broken at a number of places due to lack of weight machine to check loaded trucks, which has been causing big losses to the private commuters and public transporters who are bearing expenses of thousands of rupees on repair of their vehicles every month for the last two years.

One Shah Faisal, who has import-export business with Afghanistan and visits Thall tehsil of Hangu every Thursday on his car, told this scribe that he had to spend up to Rs18,000 a month on repair of his vehicle due to the broken highway. He said that now he used public transport to save his car from further damage.

Traffic in-charge of Hangu district, Mir Afzal Khan, said that the highway from Ibraheemzai to Shah Faisal Hotel, Orakzai headquarters office to Bahadar Banda bypass, Police Training College to Ghani petrol pump and a piece near Ustarzai school had become dirt routes where even signs of old road had disappeared.

The work on the said highway was going at a snail’s pace due to which the vehicles had to be driven at slow speed covering the journey in more than one extra hour.

There is no weighing machine on the highway to check loads

He said that there was always fear of accidents due to the broken road and the speeding flying coaches flew dirt in the face of the people.

He said the major problem was that of absence of weight machine as the goods transporters going to Afghanistan carried an excess load of 100 tons whereas the allowed cargo was 30 tons. He said that weight machines had been installed at Lachi on the Indus Highway, near the Kohat tunnel and Rawalpindi interchange, but the staff did not bother to remove the extra cargo from the vehicles which had caused great damage to the road. The trucks coming from Karachi and Punjab to Afghanistan came unchecked to the Hangu highway.

Project director of the highway Enginner Shakir Pervez admitted that the Rs1.2 billion highway was becoming dilapidated due to overloaded vehicles plying on it. Answering a question, he said that he had been making requests to the government for a weight machine since 2017, which were not being entertained for unknown reasons.

The work on the highway started in 2015 and was to be completed in 2018. However, it was being delayed due to shortage of funds. He added that the people did not provide a small piece of land for installation of a weight machine in Kohat at Nasratkhel. He said that now it would be installed at Ibraheemzai.

Published in Dawn, May 10th, 2019