Soon they started drawing a map of Nepal in the mud they had spread covering the width of the Maitighar-Baneshwar road and started planting rice saplings within the map. "Normally, we plant rice in our fields," Sharada Bhushal Jha, who recently gained prominence for staging a hunger strike in Kathmandu against financial irregularities in Mahottari district. "It is unfortunate that I am planting rice on the streets." [break]
Bhushal had gone to Babarmahal to join a symbolic protest organized against the delay in the construction of the expanded roads in Kathmandu. The program was organized by Bibeksheel Nepali, a newly formed political organization. Along with Jha, anti-corruption campaigner Shree Kamal Dwivedi also planted rice seedlings on the streets.
Photo: Dipesh Shrestha/Republica
Members of an anti-corruption group and newly formed political party Bibekshil Nepali planting rice saplings alongside the road, Saturday. They were protesting against delay in completing the expanded roads in the Kathmandu Valley.
The protest participants said they took to the streets after the government failed to reconstruct the widened road stretches by the end of this fiscal year, a target set by the government itself.
They also criticized the government´s tendency to build, repair and blacktop the roads in the rainy season, right before the end of the fiscal year. The say the roads that are hastily constructed in the rainy season don´t last long.
“It is just waste of budget," said Dwivedi. “Hastily constructed roads by using low-quality materials will last barely three months. This trend has been going on for years and nobody has ever bothered to question why."
According to him, government authorities often sit idle for much of the fiscal year and swing into action only when the fiscal year nears its end. "Right before the end of the fiscal year, they start work to avoid the blame," said him. "They do not care about quality of construction materials in the process."
“We still need more time to finish the road construction works," said Tulasi Sitaula, secretary of the Ministry of Physical Infrastructure and Transport. “If everything goes as per our plan, the construction work will be completed by January, 2014.”
According to him, only 17 of the newly widened roads have been completed so far in the Kathmandu Valley. More than 60 newly-expanded roads are yet to be repaired or reconstructed.
“We cannot complete our work by sticking to a fixed deadline," said Sitaula. “Rainfall and other calamities often create disturbance in our construction works, often forcing us to move the deadline further.”
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