The government will shortly release the first instalment of Tk131 crore through emergency allocation to repair the country’s dilapidated roads to make them usable before Eid-ul-Fitr.
The Finance Division officials said Finance Minister AMA Muhith signed the summary of the proposal placed by the Roads and Highways Department (RHD) before he went on a tour in Sylhet yesterday.
The finance minister was under the pressure of government high-ups to disburse the money, they added.
The officials who look into the budget of the Communications Ministry said they had yet to receive any proposal for the disbursement, adding that the RHD officials had to come and separate the allocation for road repair from the total fund.
In the current fiscal year, the government allocated Tk2,000 crore for road repair work across the country, Tk200 crore more than last year’s Tk1,800-crore allocation, RHD sources said.
The Tk131-crore fund was due to be allocated in the last fiscal year, the sources added.
The RHD officials said it is not possible to spend such a huge amount of fund to repair the roads in the days ahead of Eid vacation, and only Tk10 crore could be spent.
The RHD spent only Tk10 crore last week to procure bricks and sand for the repair work, the officials said.
A couple of years ago, the finance and communications ministries were at loggerheads over the corruption allegation in spending funds for the road repair work.
The RHD is dealing with as many as 21,481km of roads and highways across the country, along with hundreds of bridges and culverts under its jurisdiction. Every year, it spends thousands of crores of taka in repairing the roads and bridges.
The deadline set by Communications Minister Obaidul Quader expired on July 23, but some roads and highways are still in bad shape.
It is feared that the repair work that has been done so far may become redundant due to rainfall, raising the concern that there might be no relief this time for the people who will be heading home to celebrate Eid.
Donor agencies, including the World Bank, are refusing to finance any project or work with the department’s officials, thanks to the latter’s corruption.
In 2009, the WB withdrew itself from a project under which the Dhaka-Mymensingh, Sylhet-Sunamganj and Comilla-Brahmanbaria highways were supposed to be repaired.