The reconstruction and rehabilitation of University Road might not be completed within the stipulated time, as labourers and other people engaged with its reconstruction on Monday apprehended that the project would take another year to complete.
Started in August 2005, the 312 million project should have been completed by August 2007 as per the initial deadline set for its completion. But, funds constraints forced the authorities to reschedule the stipulated time and it was extended to April 2008.
The present state and pace of work on the project and interactions with the people engaged in reconstruction process at the site suggested that it could not be completed by April; 2008. At present commuters and general public suffering from great inconvenienced, either tracks of the road has been closed for vehicular traffic at many points, forcing the entire traffic to ply on single track.
Heaps of dig-out soil and rubbles can be seen everywhere on the road from Jail Chowrangi to Civics Centre, which causes immense difficulties to even pedestrians to cross over the other side of the road.
Owing to closure of one track of the road, vehicular traffic on the road usually remained bumper to bumper jam or moving at a snail pace. On the commercial side, owners of the shops located on the road have complained of big financial losses due to the absence of customers, who, they (owners) said, avoid climbing over the mounds of rubbles accumulated at various points of the road.
It may be recalled that Works & Services (W&S) department of the City District Government Karachi (CDGK) had set August 2007 as a deadline for completion of the road, which was executed in August 2005. In the wake of a "No" from the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), which had undertaken rehabilitation of the University Road under Tameer-e-Karachi Program (TKP) on bridge-financing basis, the CDGK in October 2007 extended the deadline to April 2008 for completion of the project.
When PIA after paying the first instalment of Rs 18 million refused to provide the remaining Rs 294 million fund, citing the financial crisis being confronted by it, Sindh Government undertaken the project in terms of funding.
Twenty seventh months (August 2005-November 2007) after the star of reconstruction work, the project, however, seems far from completion with labourers working in different designations at the road eyeing another one-year period for being done with their respective jobs.
"The road will take more than one year to be completed as lots of work is yet to be done", said a blacksmith preparing "jaal" (net) for the sewerage manholes to be constructed at the footpaths. "I think we would be able to complete the work...not earlier than a year", said a driver responsible for transporting the required equipment and construction material.
A welder jointing water pipelines, however, said that the work would be completed within five months. Now as left and right tracks of the road have been closed for traffic from Jail Chowrangi to New Town and New Town to Civic Center respectively, commuters are braving hours-long traffic jam on the road.
When this scribe visited the road, passengers in the public buses and others in their private cars were found sweating as vehicular traffic was either jammed or moving at a snail pace from New Town to Civic Centre due to the closure of one side of the road. Illegal car parking on two sides of the road in front of Civic Center is further aggravating the traffic problem on the road. Police officers can also be seen standing in the middle of road probing mostly the bikers without being wary of the traffic disturbances attributed by them.
Meanwhile, dug-up roads in vicinity of the Civic Centre have put the CDGK in a complete communication isolation since the holy month of Ramzan, said an irritated CDGK official requesting anonymity.
"Dug up roads at University Road have left us with no communication network at all since Ramzan and now EDOs (Executive District Officers) are using wireless telephones provided by the National Telecommunication Corporation (NTC)".
He said the NTC, a sister institution of Pakistan Telecommunication Corporation Limited (PTCL), had provided the facility as an acknowledgement of its inability to repair the badly damaged telephone cables and would charge Rs 3000 per month for the service.
He also complained that the NTC provided the phones only to the EDOs and not the District Officers (DOs), who were also included in the requisition. On commercial front, Abdul Qadir, a transporter who runs buses from Karachi to Quetta and Peshawar, said: "Earlier (before August 2005) we used to send 10 buses a day but now we hardly manage to send three buses. This is just because of the broken road".
"I had to shut down my shop after reconstruction of the road was started as no customer (mostly Rickshaw drivers) could reach here", said a desperate shopkeeper who used to sell Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) in front of old Subzi Mandi.
"From Jail Chowrangi to the University everything in a complete mess whether it's sewerage and water lines or traffic nobody can think of our miseries", a person running public call office on the road said. When contacted Shabih-ul-Hasan, Additional District Officer (ADO), W&S, CDGK brushed aside the apprehension of the labourers and other people regarding delay in completion of the project.
"No deadline can be given as it depends upon the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board (KWSB) which is installing pipelines and would hopefully complete its job within 15 days".
He claimed that once the KWSB laid down sewerage line and complete its work, the project would take not more than a month to be completed, adding that shifting of old electric poles from the road had almost been done. Apprehensions of the workers, if come true, would further add to miseries of the commuters and citizens, who are already fed up with the CDGK's extensive but ill-planned and simultaneously initiated developmental projects across the metropolitan.