Road projects inspection drive
2 min readPatna: The road construction department has formed 40 teams of engineers to inspect 500 projects as part of a special inspection drive of the roads and bridges completed or ongoing between April 2016 and February 2018.
The five-day inspection drive will start from May 21 in which the teams of two engineers each will check the condition of 500 projects across the state, road construction minister Nand Kishore Yadav announced on Thursday.
“During the NDA time, road was always given priority and this sector played an important role in changing the face of the state,” the minister said during the one day training cum orientation workshop on the special inspection drive organised on the premises of the Bihar State Road Development Corporation Limited (BSRDCL).
“Earlier the roads of Bihar were a joke and people used to mock the pathetic condition of roads in Bihar. However, ever since NDA came to power in 2005, we took the extra effort on the road sector and in 10 years we changed the perception of Bihar roads.”
Every team would have either one executive engineer or superintending engineer, and one assistant engineer. The inspecting teams have to submit the inspection report through the project management and information system (PMIS), an online application developed by the department with the help of the National Informatics Centre (NIC) for integrated online monitoring of all its projects. The inspecting teams have to submit their reports daily, and later they also need to submit the hard copy of the inspection.
Out of the 500 projects, 250 are completed and the rest are ongoing projects.
“The idea is to conduct an internal audit of the road projects to keep track of the quality of the work being carried out by our department,” Nand Kishore said.
“We have already achieved the target of reaching Patna from any district headquarters in six hours and now we working on the target of five hours as per the instruction of chief minister Nitish Kumar.”
Department principal secretary Amrit Lal Meena, BSRDCL chief general manager Chandra Shekhar, department engineer in chief Laxmi Narayan Das and chief engineer (monitoring) Sabrat Sarkar were present at the training day event.
Nand Kishore stressed that inspection will work as database for future reference and in coming days most of the state highways and major district road will come under the long-term output and performance based road assets maintenance contract.
Under the contract, 8,060 km of roads have been handed over to private contractors for maintenance for five years. The first phase of the contracts will end in December 2018, after which fresh tenders would be invited.
Courtesy: The Telegraph
