One singular achievement of our nearly six decades of development planning has been that a national roads system now connects all important parts of the country.
Looking back, the country didn’t build paved roads or even dirt roads during the hundred years of Rana regime that ended in 1950. Reportedly, no more than 10 miles of paved roads existed in Kathmandu Valley, used by a couple dozen model T-cars, then the exclusive preserve of high Rana officials and their families.[break]
Kathmandu Valley then had no road connections to outside, which made car and other imports into the Valley an arduous process. Imported cars had to be dismantled at the India border and transported piece-by-piece by human carriers over mountain trails to the flatlands of the Valley some 100 kilometers away.
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All of this is history and the country can now boast of nearly 7,000 kilometers of national highways and about half that length of paved inner city roads and alleys.
The first national highway, Tribhuvan Rajpath, opened in the late 1950s, connecting Naubise at the outskirts of Kathmandu Valley with Raxaul nearly 150 kilometers away.
Next came the Mahendra Rajmarg in the 1960s that connected East and West ends of the country, passing through the northern ends of Tarai belt, stretching over a thousand kilometers.
Over the next 30 years through the end of the 1990s, most of the 75 district headquarters had been made accessible by roads, some of it hard-surfaced. The premise then was that dirt and gravel roads connecting the interiors would gradually be converted to concrete and asphalt and new highway system would be developed to accommodate a larger and growing volume of vehicular traffic. One recent major undertaking in the national highway expansion program has been a 1,700-kilometer Mid-Hill Highway that would connect the Hill regions of the country from East to West.
Overall, the country’s road-building effort has indeed been admirable, and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that development planning in the country has been justified on the ground of having successfully built a road network, where none existed before. In other areas, the country’s planned development has largely been a fiasco—also a con-game—representing unprecedented misuse of public funds.
While we can justly be proud of having at least the rudiments of a national road network, we can’t entirely be happy about it. The main problem we now face is that most of our roads—main highways and auxiliary roads—are in bad shape, showing extreme deterioration and making for hazardous travel.
During the past one month of my stay in the country, I have traveled about a 1,000 kilometers of these roads, of which no more than ten percent looked to be in good condition. This means that almost all of our roads are in bad shape, littered with major breakages, water puddles, sinkholes, and dangerous bridge-crossings. Shaky bridges with broken slabs and missing wooden joints pose extreme risks for even small-size vehicles, and more so for 16-wheelers that cross them on a regular basis.
The most surprising aspect of what we observe of our road conditions is our indifference towards it—both as public as well as government officials responsible for repairs and maintenance. Much worse, people seem to have come to expect bad roads to be normal and the only time they are surprised is when segments of the road actually look good!
A bigger surprise is the lack of government accountability for keeping the roads in good condition, which would have meant that repair and maintenance crews are kept ready to swing into action if there is need for repair, which happens frequently and extensively.
However, nothing of this sort can be observed on our roads, even in places where road conditions are dangerous. One can suspect that road officials wait until roads get completely destroyed and become unusable. If that happens, they get multiple times the allocations than what could have been spent on routine maintenance. There is a unanimous view that there is little accountability for repair and maintenance expenditure and officials get much larger kickbacks if the roads have to be re-built from scratch.
Looking at the poor to dire conditions of existing roads and major highways, it hardly makes sense to build new ones, even if we have plenty of resources to do so which, of course, we do not. If we really care about how we make use of our scarce resources, we need to impose a complete ban on new road-building and use all of the roads budget for repair and maintenance work. If we prioritize our roads budget this way, we can increase the productivity of road spending multiple times than what we can expect out of the newly-built roads which, in view of the speed with which they tend to deteriorate, constitute a zero return on invested capital.
However, it will be foolhardy to employ government contractors and crews for repair and maintenance work, given the extent of leakage of such spending. Had the government machinery been good at doing its job, our roads wouldn’t have been in such a bad shape in the first place. The truth is that government spending in general and public works spending in particular are unproductive and burdensome to society in the long haul, because we also make use of foreign loan to build roads that soon disappear; but the same loan has to be paid back with interest.
A better and more efficient option would then be to privatize roads spending. This would mean that road repair and maintenance budget shouldn’t be given to any government department or agency, including to Roads Department that has a long and illustrious record of misusing public funds, sometimes to the extent of 100 percent. If abuses of power and public funds by Roads Department get investigated by the CIAA, hundreds of their officials would be in jail and several billion worth of stolen funds would be recovered.
Privatization of roads budget can be done through grassroots agencies such as cooperatives, a wing of it established in each of the Village Development Committees (VDCs) which can be given the road maintenance and repair works. VDCs will have a direct interest in using the road funds in the most efficient manner and such engagements at the local level will generate jobs and incomes while ensuring quality work. Similarly, for maintenance of city streets and national highways, city and national level cooperatives should be opened and made responsible for road work.
Cooperatives having failed in their core work of developing the village economy; making them responsible and accountable for the upkeep of road system will not only help our roads become usable but in poverty alleviation in a way that adds value to the national economy.
Can this simple, transparent, and efficient system of managing our roads be considered and adopted by our policymakers—administrators and politicians? No chance—now or ever.
As a society, we have learned to live with the difficulties of daily life, including a quiet acceptance of whatever we see happening to our roads. In most societies I know of, such situations would be termed unacceptable, and ameliorative measures would immediately be taken, including jail terms for offending public officials and contractors. In this society, we are soft on crime and financial crimes get rewarded, not punished. All this means that we have to continue living the way we have, including with roads that will put any other society to shame!
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