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The government has finalised its plan to expand the four-lane Dhaka-Chattogram highway into 10 lanes and is considering managing funds from both private investors and multilateral agencies due to the high cost estimated at Tk 620 billion.
Officials said though the cost is lower than the earlier estimate of Tk 732 billion made by the Roads and Highways Department (RHD) by totalling the demands of its zonal offices, it is still high due to accommodating many new features into the busiest corridor of the country.
Sources, however, said RHD owns 90 per cent of the land to the right of the 250km highway. Yet, the project cost could not be reduced much.
Compared to the previous upgradation to four lanes in 2016, the latest one will see the cost rise over 16 times.
The RHD recently completed the project's feasibility study and detailed design with support from the Asian Development Bank (ADB), proposing a six-and-a-half-lane access control highway and two-lane service roads on both sides to ensure seamless movement of vehicles.
Besides, the highway, crucial for its economic importance of connecting the capital with the main port city, will have six multilevel elevated intersection crossings and over 20 elevated service interchanges.
"Being the lifeline of the country, efforts have been made to include all possible options in the highway's design to ensure seamless movement of all forms of transport and people," said Project Director Md Sabbir Hasan Khan.
He said features like a three-metre emergency lane within the access control road and multi-layered interchanges with connections from different sides have been added, taking speed and safety into account.
Sabbir, an additional chief engineer, also said the entire corridor would be a toll road.
The option to build part of the access control road under public-private partnership (PPP) is also being explored, he added.
The ADB, which supported the feasibility study and detailed design under a technical project taken in 2023, is working on determining the scope of the PPP.
It would suggest which parts of the road should be built under PPP and which ones using loans.
Sources said preparing the development project proposal would take time as the process of studying the PPP option would need half a year.
The Dhaka-Chattogram highway remains in a bad condition after its upgradation into four lanes in 2016 at a cost of Tk 38 billion.
Though the RHD took initiatives to turn it into an access control highway soon after its opening, its PPP road plan was dumped after a feasibility study.
According to the RHD data, the highway's daily traffic was 35,482 in 2019, which rose to 46,501 in 2024.
smunima@yahoo.com