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Sylhet-Tamabil Road

Work on dual carriageway to start next year

Tuhin Shubhra Adhikary
The government is going to start upgrading the Sylhet-Tamabil highway to dual carriageway late next year as Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) has agreed to fund the project.
The Roads and Highways Division (RHD) has completed negotiations with the China-led AIIB and hopes that the loan issue would be settled at AIIB's board meeting scheduled in March.
The RHD then would be able to sign a loan deal by May or June, said AK Mohammad Fazlul Karim, superintending engineer (Road Design and Safety Circle) of the RHD.
He said they had prepared a detailed design for the route in 2015, financed by Asian Development Bank.
Now, an India-Bangladesh joint-venture company is reviewing the detailed design which is
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expected to be completed within January, Fazlul, also the project director, told this correspondent yesterday.
This would be the first project in Bangladesh's transport sector that is funded by AIIB. Earlier, it had financed projects of the energy sector.
Apart from inter-city connectivity, the upgradation of 56.16-kilometer highway would improve cross-border connectivity between Bangladesh and India and would reduce travel time, officials said.
Tamabil, a hilly area in Sylhet across the border of the Indian state of Meghalaya, about 5km from Jaflong, is a popular tourist destination.
As per the Development Project Proposal (DPP), the project cost would be Tk 3729.53 crore, of which Tk 3100.50 crore would come as project aid while the rest would be given by the government.
"We have already submitted a DPP to the planning ministry and gotten the approval at the Project Evaluation Committee (PEC) and hope the project would be placed before Executive Committee of the National Economic Council (Ecnec) soon for approval," Ashraful Alam, additional chief engineer (planning and maintenance wing) of the RHD, told The Daily Star yesterday.
Once the Ecnec passes the project, the RHD will float an international tender to pick a contractor and hopes to start the project's physical work within October next year, he said. DHAKA-SYLHET-TAMAB1L Dhaka-Sylhet-Tamabil is part of Asian Highways 1 and 2 and the government has long been working to upgrade the two-lane highway.
AH-1 isthelongestrouteoftheAsian Highway Network and runs 20,557km from Tokyo, Japan via Korea, China, Southeast Asia, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran to the border between Turkey and Bulgaria, west of Istanbul, where it joins the European route.
AH-2 oftheAsian Highway Network runs 13,107 km from Denpasar, Indonesia to Merak and Singapore to Khosravi, Iran via Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar, India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan.
The impasse over financing the expansion of the 214-kilometre Dhaka-Sylhet Highway into four lanes has come near the end as Asian Development Bank has given consent to fund the project.
And now, AIIB agreed to finance the Sylhet-Tamabil part.
The overall objective of the "Improvement of the Sylhet-Tamabil Road to Four-lane Highway" project is to generate economic benefits by the facilitation the faster, safer and more economic links between Sylhet and Tamabil, reads the project documents.
Besides, the border crossing at Tamabil - between Bangladesh and India - has the potential to generate significantly increased traffic which would have a positive economic affect for the people.
Further economic benefits could be expected from the increased use of the road corridor by commercial traffic travelling to and from other parts of the country and cross-border traffic travelling from eastern India to Dhaka, it added.
TWO MORE PROJECTS
AIIB is expected to finance two more projects in transport sector.
The infrastructure-focused lender, which began its journey in 2016, has given consent to fund a bridge in Mymensingh's Kewatkhali over Brahmaputra River and the feasibility study of the project is underway, officials said.
Besides, AIIB, along with World Bank, is expected to co-finance the upgradation work of Hatikumrul-Banpara-Jhenaidah two-lane road to a four-lane highway, they said.
Feasibility work for some parts of the route has already been done, they added.