Daily Times

Sir, media reports about a large portion of the road adjacent to GPO caving in, following heavy rains, exposes the fact that a proper soil survey was not carried out by the concerned regulators and contractors. Unfortunately every major political party and powerful state institution seems to be dominated by contractors and land developers in this country. Mega projects, which have investments of hundreds of billions of rupees, are awarded to contractors who fail to follow laid down procedures such as proper soil survey and involvement of qualified structural engineers. They do this in order to cut corners, and add to their profits. It is a failure of the State that they would rather submit to political and bureaucratic pressures, than merit and professional competence when selecting contractors. This is a deplorable situation, and one of the basic mandatory obligations of a state should be to establish independent powerful regulators that can oversee each project and ensure compliance to specification before awarding contracts or later when giving payments and completion certificates.

When embarking on mega projects, environmental conditions such as heavy seasonal monsoon rains, and seismic fault lines etc should be catered to, as no roads is supposed to just cave in, no matter how heavy the rainfall. These failures can also be seen in the state’s choice for the new Islamabad airport, as the soil survey report recommended that an alternate location should be used instead, but the report was ignored completely. Additionally problems were found in the in the design of the airport, and it was later revealed that the spacing between the two parallel runways made it impossible for two planes to land or depart at the same time, which is what the runways were originally designed for.

Such political and bureaucratic interferences in matters, which should be left solely to the discretion of qualified professionals and specialists, deprived Pakistan of billions of rupees. This is due to the substandard quality of work done, which could have instead been invested on education, health and the provision of basic necessities to our 200 million citizens.

ALI MALIK

Karachi

Published in Daily Times, July 7^th 2018.