The good and the bad

For over two months, work on the road going through the Rah-e-Aman Colony on Adiala Road, Rawalpindi, has been going on to improve the overall look of the area and while I’m sure most of the work has made the residents happy, some of it is poorly executed. It makes you wonder if there is any supervision by the authorities concerned to see that the contractor has done his job properly.

To begin with, drains were cleaned and mended where needed. It was gratifying to see that large slabs were being used to cover them and keep them clean of garbage. This took some time as first the slabs were deposited along the road, after which three days later a few workers came and placed them on the drain in a slip shod manner. A week went by then they were straightened and fixed properly. Time consuming!

I asked one of the workers which civic authority was responsible for the work and he said he did not know – he only knew ‘general sahib’ had passed and ordered someone to fix the mess – a sad reflection of how things work in this country! Well, thanks to his orders, at least some good steps have been taken to mark road boundaries; a divider has been placed near the entrance to the main road so cars leaving the colony remain in queue instead of blocking incoming traffic; reflective mirrors have been placed near dangerous curves; road bumps have been built - but left unmarked - so drivers do not behave as if the devil was chasing them and speed down the road, while cats eyes have also been installed to mark the curves. These essentials for road safety were long needed here.

In the meantime the ridiculous cemented enclosure was being built to contain the huge amount of garbage that collects on a space near a girl’s school. That’s another story and the uselessness of this construction has already been pointed out on these pages a few weeks ago. Anyway, what happened next? All the slabs were removed from the drains along the road and taken to cover the drain opposite the garbage dump! Besides the waste of time and labour, it appears whoever was doing the renovations ran out of funds!

Project of this nature need to be planned and executed in a proper way to avoid the mistakes that were made and it’s probably because labour is so cheap here that people try and muddle through the job without thinking of the end result. We need to change that mindset and take pride in what we do.