MANSEHRA: The local government representatives on Sunday demanded the National Highway Authority (NHA) to reopen Mansehra-Naran-Jalkhad road to traffic so that residents could go back to native villages and cultivate crops in Batakundi village in the Kaghan valley.
“The families shifted to other parts of Hazara due to snowfall couldn’t return back because of the delay in reopening the Kaghan-Battakundi section of the road,” Mukhtiar Ahmad Mughal, the nazim of the neighbourhood council, told a news conference at the Garhi Habibullah.
Flanked by a group of local government representatives, Mughal said that neither the NHA nor the Kaghan Development Authority (KDA) was sincerely working to reopen the Mansehra-Naran-Jalkhad road.
He said as Battakundi was famous for its potato and pea crops across the country and even abroad but peasants could not go back to cultivate the crops.
“This main artery was blocked in late November last year after the heavy snowfall in the Kaghan valley suspending the traffic between Gilgit-Baltistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which couldn’t be reopened to traffic as yet,” he said.