Short working season alibi : Mother of delays and more delays
- The Sangai Express Editorial :: May 10, 2012 -

Working season has been the alibi for work agencies (read contractors, builders or corporations) and the Government for far too long for any development projects to overshoot its deadline by years.

Water scarcity is a perennial problem in Manipur, but ironically it is the long rainy season which has been bandied about for the inability of any project to be completed on time and nowhere is this more visible than the roads that crisscross the entire length and breadth of the State.

For reasons that should be obvious to all, the attention of the State Government and the people has been on the work progress taken up along the Imphal-Jiribam stretch of NH-37 and the creased brows that have come to define the visage of the officials of the Border Roads Organisation, the agency entrusted with the task of constructing, maintaining and rehabilitating NH-37, is writ large with the term ‘working season’.

Generally the working season, especially when it comes to road works in the hill areas, are those that are deemed to be the dry months, say from October till the early part of April or before the sky opens up in all its grandeur.

Now with 2012 already into its 5th month, May, the rainy season is at hand and it was against this backdrop that the newly inducted Works Minister Dr Kh Ratan undertook a tour of the said stretch to get a first hand account of the work progress.

Some time back, the much hyped inspection visit of Union Minister of State for Defence, Palam Raju ended in some sort of an anti-climax as the chopper could not take off due to the inclement weather-exposing the half baked idea of inspecting a road work by taking an aerial route.

However the message is somehow not lost on us and that is the importance of NH-37 has begun to register in the minds of the powers that be, thanks to the regular rituals of prolonged economic blockades.

It also remains true that inspection, in as much as it is desired, will remain just that, if there are no follow up actions. This is a message which should register in the mind of the new Works Minister.

March 2013 is reportedly the deadline the BRO has set upon itself to complete the construction of the said highway. The key word here is construction and we have desisted from using the word repairing or rehabilitating for the obvious reason that at no point of time was NH-37 a truly motorable road.

Initial reports coming from the visit of the Works Minister suggest that the BRO has assured that it would finish the shingling work of the said stretch within this month.

This falls somewhere between the dividing line of ‘working season’ and the rainy season. There has been no inputs in so far as the question of upgrading the Barak and Makru bridges is concerned or whether these bridges form part of the works component or not.

After Manipur witnessed her first prolonged economic blockade in the form of the 52 days highway blockade imposed by the All Naga Students' Association, Manipur in 2005 followed by the 63 days blockade in 2010 and the record setting 123 days blockade last year, the Government has been forced to look at an alternative route, the importance of which should have registered in the minds of the political leadership a long, long time back.

Ironically it has not been the Government which has been keeping a close tab on the working of the BRO along this stretch but some social organisations and the transporters.

The question then is what stability, read the uninterrupted ten years of the Congress led SPF Government, has meant to the only viable alternative lifeline of the people and the place.

Apart from keeping a close tab on the work progress along this highway, the State Government should see to it that this is not the time to play musical chairs, but pile the pressure on the BRO. The rains will come anyday soon, and this will be another perfect alibi to retard the work on this stretch.

Attributing the short working season to the failure to move the work progress more than a few kilometres in a decade is not how a State should be run.