Just an 11.5 km stretch between Ashuganj and Sarail has turned into a nightmare for commuters of the entire Sylhet division and Brahmanbaria district.
The Indian contractor assigned to the project has failed to complete the work on time, and even routine maintenance has been halted. As a result, the Dhaka–Sylhet Highway’s Ashuganj–Sarail section has been riddled with potholes, causing daily traffic congestion and suffering for thousands of travellers.
To ease the situation, the Road Transport and Highways Division has given the Roads and Highways Department (RHD) a fixed deadline to restore the route. A 12-member committee has also been formed to supervise the work, according to ministry sources.
A field office has been set up in Sarail, where engineers have been instructed to stay stationed and oversee the ongoing repairs and construction round the clock.
According to insiders, Road Transport and Bridges Ministry Adviser Muhammad Fouzul Kabir Khan will visit Ashuganj next Wednesday to assess the progress and the current condition of the highway. Officials say the ministry has instructed authorities to treat the situation as an “emergency wartime effort.”
Ferdous Bhuiyan, a government employee whose office is in Sylhet and home in Ashuganj, described the ordeal. He boarded a bus from Ashuganj at 6:00 am on Sunday. What used to be a three-hour trip now takes nearly double that time. “It took me over two hours just to get past the Sarail Bishwaroad intersection,” he said.
Ferdous, who commutes weekly, added, “The suffering has worsened in the past year. Now, the round trip from Ashuganj to Sylhet takes around six hours each way.”
Witnesses said that during the Durga Puja holidays last week, the Dhaka–Sylhet Highway saw massive gridlocks, stretching about 34 kilometres—from Ashuganj roundabout to Madhabpur in Habiganj via Sarail Bishwaroad and Shahbazpur Bridge.
The highway carries more than a thousand buses daily between Sylhet division’s four districts and Brahmanbaria alone, not counting private cars, microbuses, and freight trucks. Many of the travellers are tourists or expatriate passengers. The road’s poor condition has made their journeys increasingly miserable.
The 12-member monitoring committee
The RHD has formed a 12-member committee headed by AKM Rezaul Karim, project director of the Dhaka–Sylhet Highway four-lane expansion project. Members include officials from the RHD headquarters, Cumilla Zone, Brahmanbaria Road Circle, and project staff. They have been ordered to stay at the Sarail field office to supervise the ongoing work.
Their mandate includes immediate repair of the damaged highway to ensure traffic movement, maintaining coordination with local administration and police, and sending daily updates to the RHD chief engineer on progress and ground realities.
Senior Secretary of the Road Transport and Highways Division, Ehsanul Haque, told Prothom Alo that the damaged section was part of a highway expansion project financed by Indian credit. “The contractor failed to deliver on time and has been penalised. We have instructed them to make visible progress within a month and to complete the work by December,” he said.
According to RHD data, an average of 30,000 vehicles travel daily from Kanchpur to Itakhola in Narayanganj along the Dhaka–Sylhet Highway. Between Itakhola and Sherpur (Sylhet), the daily average is 10,000–15,000 vehicles, while from Sherpur to Sylhet city the number rises again to around 27,000. A large portion of this traffic consists of CNG-run auto-rickshaws.
How the highway came to this state
The four-lane expansion of the entire 209 km Dhaka–Sylhet highway is ongoing under a Tk 169.18 billion project, which also includes separate service roads for local traffic on both sides.
Separately, another project was taken up earlier to upgrade the road from Ashuganj river port to Akhaura via Bishwa Road, under Indian line of credit. Launched in 2017, the project—revised once—now costs Tk 57.91 billion, of which Tk 29.82 billion comes from Indian credit and Tk 28.09 billion from the Bangladesh government. The project was due for completion in June this year, but only about half the work has been done. All three work packages were awarded to India’s Afcons Infrastructure Limited.
RHD sources said that during the Covid-19 pandemic, the contractor made little progress. The work gained momentum in 2022, with around 300 Indian nationals employed alongside local engineers and labourers. However, after the fall of the Awami League government on 5 August last year, most of the Indian workers left Bangladesh, halting progress. When work resumed later, the contractor demanded additional payment for “variation costs,” while neglecting maintenance of the existing road. This neglect, officials said, triggered the current crisis.
An RHD official, requesting anonymity, said, “Due to the ongoing expansion work, traffic speed has already slowed along the highway. But the Ashuganj section is so damaged that vehicles virtually stop moving. The suffering began after the Indian contractor started work but failed to maintain the existing road.”
Sources at the ministry said the interim government has decided in principle to cancel the contract for the 11.5-kilometre stretch from Dharkhar in Brahmanbaria to the Akhaura border, as cross-border trade with India is currently limited and the section is no longer a top priority. However, work will continue on the 32-kilometre section from Sarail to Dharkhar.
The Ashuganj–Sarail section originally included 3.5-metre-wide service lanes on both sides for local vehicles, but the government has recently decided to widen these to 5.5 metres. The interim government has approved an additional Tk 1.64 billion for this purpose. The allocation will now be used both for road expansion and immediate repairs.