How to waste Tk 42.68 billion!

An old joke tells of an African minister who once visited his Asian friend's huge mansion and asked how he could afford it on a government salary. The Asian smiled and gestured to a half-finished bridge and a new highway outside his window. "10 per cent from each," he said. A year later, the visit was returned. This time, the Asian was the one marvelling at his African friend's even grander home and asked the same question. The African pointed to an empty field where a highway was supposed to be.  "100 per cent," he replied with a wide smile. 

This joke is funny because the Asian side of the story feels uncomfortably familiar and has its parallels in Bangladesh. A perfect example of it is the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) project between Dhaka airport and Gazipur, which was cancelled even after 97 per cent of the work was completed. It took the authorities over a decade and a whopping Tk 42.68 billion to finally realise that this nearly finished project had become an unsolvable problem. 

The entire experience of the project has been dreadful from the very beginning. Conceived in 2012 as a quick fix for the crippling congestion on the Dhaka-Mymensingh Highway, the BRT was meant to run from Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport to Shib Bari of Gazipur. The plan promised dedicated lanes for modern buses departing every thirty seconds, cutting the journey to under forty minutes. The initial four-year timeline came and went without completion. After that, the government granted three more extensions, yet the work kept dragging on. Throughout this prolonged process, construction zones became death traps and the highway a perilous obstacle course, causing multiple fatalities and countless accidents. Construction firms, shielded by political influence, operated with impunity and avoided accountability at every turn. The government kept revising the plans and budgets and each amendment only drove up costs without correcting the fundamental design flaws. In the end, the project became an economic burden and political embarrassment until it could no longer be considered a viable transport solution and was quietly shelved. 

The project was doomed from the start by a serious design flaw that any transport expert or even a regular commuter of the highway could have predicted. It involved the planners' decision to reserve the middle lanes exclusively for the new BRT buses, forcing all other traffic such as long-haul trucks, buses, cars from 25 districts and local rickshaws and vans to be compressed into the already saturated side lanes. Even on paper, that arrangement was absurd and unworkable. The planners ignored the highway's real traffic patterns and the chaos that would inevitably ensue in the side lanes once the centre was closed. Furthermore, the design disregarded basic operational practicality of running buses on the roads. Regular buses in Bangladesh have doors on the left, but the BRT stations were built in the middle of the road, meaning the new buses had to have doors on the right against the norm. It is hard to imagine how such a fundamental mismatch slipped past engineers, consultants and officials alike. 

Right from its outset, the BRT project seemed set to frustrate commuters. In Uttara, the very first or the last BRT station, depending on how you look at it, makes the busy airport road narrower at a spot that could easily have been widened to add four more lanes. Because of this one bad decision, traffic now gets stuck there every single day. While the nine flyovers provide some relief overhead, the areas underneath them look like abandoned ruins, with pools of dirty water and piles of debris. It seems the authorities approached this as a mere construction endeavour rather than a real transport solution. The stations themselves, with their huge pillars, escalators and stairs, took over the entire footpath leaving no safe space for pedestrians and forcing everyone onto the busy road. Officials promised to fix the sidewalks later by acquiring more land, but after 12 years of empty assurances, no one is holding their breath. In fact, if any project deserved a medal for trying the public's patience, this one would win hands down.

According to experts, prolonged delays of the BRT project have cost the country around $123 million every year in lost productivity and fuel. Over eight years, that adds up to nearly a billion dollars. Just imagine how many better roads or metro lines could have been built with that money. Instead, it disappeared into the quicksand of inefficiency and corruption. The government has now abandoned the project, with reports indicating that top officials have lost faith and are thinking of scrapping it completely. It's a stunning waste. After all that time and money, we are left with a nearly finished, utterly useless system unlikely to carry a single passenger.

Which brings us to the most pressing question that the project's quiet and unceremonious shelving tries to avoid. Who is accountable for this mess? Thus far, no one has been held responsible for the massive waste of public funds or the suffering it caused ordinary citizens. When costs more than double, when deadlines are endlessly extended and when people endure years of hardship only to see the project scrapped, those in charge owe the public answers. The officials who designed and oversaw this doomed scheme must be called to account. We must ask why such a fundamentally flawed design was ever approved and who benefited from decisions that defied all common sense. Billions of dollars in foreign debt were poured into a futile endeavour precisely because of these reckless choices, leaving taxpayers to foot the bill for years to come. 

With the project now abandoned, the government is now obligated to come up with a credible alternative to tackle traffic crisis on this crucial route. People did not endure years of dust, endless hours trapped in traffic, detours and danger for nothing. They deserve better. At the very least, they are owed a credible, actionable plan to deliver tangible solutions. 

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