City’s outer ring road

A Japanese company's lukewarm interest in a planned project with the potential of doing away with much of the capital city's gridlock is highly disappointing. The project is the outer ring road, which was supposed to go round the capital.  Marubeni Corporation of Japan, the company concerned, is the project's part-financier. It's disheartening to learn that the company is now interested in constructing a very small part of the 50-kilometre ring road. The Road Transports and Highways Division (RTHD) doesn't find the plan viable under the PPP model. Ironically, Marubeni was selected as a potential investor during a Japan-Bangladesh Joint Platform meeting to build the outer ring road under government-to-government PPP model.

The delay in implementing the outer ring road in its original form in Dhaka is feared to exact a heavy toll on the capital. Had Marubeni been free of its present opaqueness on its position on the planned outer ring road, its relations with Bangladesh would have gone a long way. The RTHD authorities held a meeting recently with the Japanese company on its revised shorter length of the planned outer ring road. It has been learned that the company-proposed 18-km stretch from Kalakandi to the 3rd Shitalakkhya bridge is located in the middle of the southern part of the outer ring road. The financing of the two other parts is still not confirmed under the PPP model.

Although Dhaka had dreamt of circular railways and circular waterways, it focused on an outer ring road only informally. Unfortunately, the first two were eventually dropped due to technical reasons. Although the ring road plan was approved in 2016, the original 20-year plan proposed to develop inner, middle and outer ring roads to help reduce traffic gridlocks through accelerating the process of decentralisation as well as shifting of businesses to the city outskirts. None of those saw even the distant signs of materialisation in the last six years. Given the developments punctuated by amateurish work suspensions, many grand plans died at the stage of the basic paper work.

Before going full throttle in executing the Dhaka outer ring road, the authorities must have scrutinised its pros and cons. It's not always possible to foretell the unwarranted developments just before the start of a work. In the case of the Marubeni episode, an ambitious plan related to solving one of Dhaka's most pressing problems --- traffic gridlock, had been taken in earnest. As a natural corollary, Dhaka pinned great hope on the outer ring road project with the start of a feasibility study in 2020 on the ring road's eastern, western and northern segments. But the problem of overlapping of the work by different agencies began haunting the project soon. It occurred during planning of the road as other agencies like the Bangladesh Bridge Authority have also been considering plans to develop expressways in the same area. The authorities concerned are upbeat. According to sources, out of the entire 50-km ring road's southern wing, a meeting proposed construction of its third part immediately with the government's own funds. Had the project's work progressed without the hiccups at the execution stage, it would have been a reality by now.