ISLAMABAD, Dec 15: With road maintenance cost touching Rs8-10 billion per annum, the government has decided to ban the movement of overloaded vehicles on national highways with effect from June next year.

The overloading and bad driving together cause Rs35-40 billion loss to the national economy every year in the shape of delayed supplies, damage to vehicles, and accidents, a senior government official told Dawn.

As a first step, the National Highway Authority (NHA) has been directed to take stern action against violators of load specifications.

The maintenance cost of roads maintained by the NHA alone was Rs3-4 billion per annum and allocations to the NHA under the public sector development programme (PSDP) ranged between Rs500-600m, the official said.

The NHA has asked the trucks association to bring down their load to a maximum of 20 tons on two-excel lorries by January and further to 17 tons by June next year.

The sources said that trucks association had resisted the move and threatened to block the national highways throughout the country earlier when the NHA asked them to immediately comply with the road specifications.

The truck owners have now been given six months to meet the road specifications, because they needed time and to modify the rims and suspensions of their vehicles.

At present, two-excel trucks carry up to 30 tons of weight notwithstanding the fact that all national highways are designed at 8.4-ton excel which comes to a maximum of 17-ton load for two-excels.

Official estimates suggest that the wearing out of the national highways like the GT Road was 16 times higher than the planned life of the road. This means that a road designed to last 16 years gets damaged in just one year.

The NHA officials claim that the total cost of over 200,000 trucks plying on national highways from Khyber to Karachi amounted to Rs30 million which was almost equivalent to the construction cost of two kilometre road.

After June 2003, 2-excel trucks with more than 17 tons weight would not be allowed to get on the main roads, the official said.

Similarly, local governments, municipal and provincial authorities have also been asked to ensure load specifications within their jurisdiction so that local roads, which did not fall in the jurisdiction of the NHA, lost for a longer period.