COMMUTERS suffer on a daily basis on the under construction (for 40 years) Lowari Pass connecting Chitral to the rest of Pakistan. Many people in our country know of the 8.6km Lowari tunnel but few know that in heavy snowfall vehicles from Chitral cannot even get to this high tunnel.

On Jan 7, after waiting for help for over 12 hours, the commuters had to abandon their journey and return to Chitral.

The contract work for building a seven-kilometre vital portion of this road on the Chitral side of the tunnel had been given to contractors in March 2017 at an unbelievable cost of over 200 crores. The work was to be completed in March 2019 but there is no sign of this work being completed by March 2020 or even March 2021. Such is the way contracts are given and supervised in remote areas of our country.

It is easy for contractors in their rejoinder to say ‘quality of work completed so far has been satisfactorily approved and duly verified from time to time by the National Highway Authority’. We all know what ‘satisfactorily approved’ and ‘duly verified’ mean in our country. Even a layman driving his vehicle on this road can easily see how meaningless such words are when he sees the quality, expense and delay occurring so blatantly on building this road.

Then surely there must be a clause in the contract between NHA and contractors which says that the contractor must clear the snow which builds up on his broken portion of this road while they are building it. If so why is NHA not enforcing it nowadays when we get stuck just because no one is clearing the snow despite the availability of heavy road construction machinery lying idly along it?

Instead of meaningless road signs that contractors have put up on this road they should display their cellphone numbers so that hapless commuters stuck in snow in the middle of the night know who to ask for help and who are responsible for their misery.

Siraj Ulmulk
Chitral

Published in Dawn, January 17th, 2020