Chairman National Highway Authority (NHA) Shahid Ashraf Tarar has said that the early completion of CPEC's Western route was organisation's top priority as it passes through the less privileged areas of the country. While welcoming the participants of Inland Study Tour of National Management Course at NHA head office here on Friday, where they were given a detailed briefing about the organisation, its working and a thorough overview of development projects currently under construction in various parts of the country.

Chairman NHA Shahid Ashraf Tarar dilated upon the profile of the organisation regarding construction, development and maintenance of national highways, motorways, expressways and strategic roads in Pakistan. He informed the guests that while roads under NHA constituted only 4 per cent of country's entire network; they carried 80 per cent of commercial and 65 per cent of cargo traffic load. He said that development projects worth over Rs 1200 billion were presently under execution including the all important China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.

He said work on different sections of the western alignment had already started and expressed his hope to complete the work by the end of 2018. He also informed that for the first time in country's history, substantial private sector investment was encouraged towards highway schemes and projects worth over Rs 340 billion were awarded on BOT (Built-Operate-Transfer) including Karachi-Hyderabad Motorway (M-9) and Lahore-Sialkot Motorway. The chairman NHA also informed the audience about the various measures NHA had adopted to ensure greater transparency in the procurement process which resulted in saving of billions of rupees to the national exchequer. The briefing was followed by a question-answer session.-PR

Copyright Business Recorder, 2017