Govt has prepared plan to extend road links to Central Asia: PM

ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Saturday said that the government had made a plan to extend the country’s road connectivity with the Central Asian States (CAS) in the first phase and subsequently to South Asia at a later stage.
This has been announced after a marathon meeting here at the PM House, where various projects pertaining to road infrastructure were thoroughly discussed by the high-ups concerned.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif chaired the meeting and it lasted about five hours. Talking to the participants of the meeting, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif directed the preparation of comprehensive plans for extending Pakistan’s road infrastructure to Central Asia in the first phase and later to South Asia.
The prime minister said that unprecedented infrastructure building activity under the National Highway Authority (NHA) Road portfolio was underway in the country and it would change the landscape of Pakistan from Gilgit-Baltistan, Azad Jammu and Kashmir to Karachi and Gwadar. With this, an era of prosperity would be ushered in and real change in the lives of the people would take place.
The prime minister said that the projects, including the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), were spread over all the provinces and the whole country would benefit from the fruit of this gigantic structural development activity across the country.
The meeting was attended by Secretary to PM Javaid Aslam, Addition Secretary to the PM Fawad Hasan Fawad, NHA Chairman Shahid Ashraf Tarar, CDA Chairman Maroof Afzal, member Syed Amir Ahmad Ali and other senior officials.
The prime minister was given a detailed briefing on the NHA road portfolio projects. He was informed in the briefing that an investment of $1 billion from the private sector in road infrastructure projects would be achieved by the end of September 2015 and the overall communication network construction activity would contribute about 1 percent to 1.5 percent to the GDP. It was also claimed in the briefing that there would be an addition of 1,272km to the existing motorways network with the completion of the under-construction and proposed projects.
The prime minister directed to complete all the projects by December 2017, other than those projects which were scheduled for earlier completion.
The prime minister directed the NHA to prepare informative packages highlighting the road construction activity and the linkages created for the areas which were previously not connected to the highway and motorway networks.
Nawaz Sharif appreciated the pace and quality of work of the NHA and directed it to maintain international standards in the quality of road construction.