Rabia Zia
Since last few months we are seeing everywhere on social media print media and electronic media that our ever so enthusiastic awam is thoroughly excited with the prospects of Bus Rapid Transit.
Our ever so enthusiastic awam when thwarted in almost every hope of development and prosperity is ready to make even more sacrifices and compromises in the hope she is being fed with in the name of BRT. Projects are the basic building blocks of development. Without successful project identification, preparation and implementation, development plans are no more than wishes and developing nations would remain stagnant or regress. No doubt projects, are the “cutting edge” of development. But is BRT a developmental mile stone or a self made disaster?
The present government in the rehearsal for the performance that actually never materializes is doing this last minute drama to captivate once more the clueless audience with a trick that might prove trump card for the upcoming elections. But our ever so enthusiastic awam should not forget in their eagerness for prosperity that how their champion leader Pakistan Tahreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan had been known for leading up the ‘campaign’ against the incumbent government’s Metro Bus project given its extravagant costs and alleged corruption.
Asad Umar and Imran Khan had also been very vocal about how the metro buses were not needed in this country and are a complete waste of resources; not to mention their blatant insistence upon PML-N being corrupt regarding the metro projects.
However, the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa’s (K-P) Provincial Working Development Party (PWDP) approved the revised Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) project with a 54 percent increase in the total cost to Rs57 billion as against December 2016’s estimation of Rs37 billion.
But is our ever so enthusiastic awam is least bit aware of how much this dream of prosperity would cost her. Despite party’s persistent criticism of federal government for taking foreign loans, it has also emerged that the project has been approved with new cost of Rs57.23 billion, in which Rs50 billion will be provided by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) as a soft loan and Rs7.23 billion by the K-P government. The Lahore metro bus service covered 27km area and with the help of 70 buses but in Peshawar, whose population is much less than Lahore’s, 300 or 450 buses would be plied under the BRT project. The Punjab government is bearing around Rs1.8 billion subsidy for 70 metro buses annually but in Peshawar, the government claims that no subsidy would be given for the BRT project. Plus project design is inappropriate to local conditions, needs and capacities. Legally and technically speaking, technical audit of the project should have been done but ironically, no such exercise had been undertaken.
Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. … The goal of which is to achieve balance/harmony between environment sustainability, economic sustainability and socio-political sustainability. The greater sustainability movement, however, is guided by these three E’s, commonly referred to as the “three pillars” of sustainability: environment, equity, and economics.
Cities and local authorities are catalysts for change and drivers of development. A multilevel governance approach is needed to deliver development to citizens and make sure that poor and marginalised groups are included in economic growth. As vehicles for social and economic change, development projects can provide the means of mobilizing resources and allocating them to the production of new economic goods and social services. The paucity of well conceived projects is a primary reason for the poor record of plan implementation in many developing countries. The inability to identify, formulate, prepare and execute projects continues to be a major obstacle to increasing the flow of capital into the poorest societies.
There are a number of legal and technical flaws in the project due to which BRT project is bound to fail and thus burdening the people of the province with loans unnecessarily. No feasibility report is prepared, which is the very basic of any developmental project.
Above all the pre-feasibility public sharing report on the project is lacking. Therefore this means failure to establish effective communications between individuals, groups or organizations involved in the project. And failure to identify or engage the stakeholders. Failing to view the project through the eyes of the stakeholders results in a failure to appreciate how the project will impact the stakeholders or how they will react to the project.
The government is imposing a decision on stakeholders and is clearly failing towards buy in of the innocent awam.
dre.iiuiswabi@gmail.com
