‘Civil work on BRT project in Peshawar to be completed in six months’

PESHAWAR: The Peshawar High Court (PHC) was told on Tuesday that the civil work on the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) project would be completed within the stipulated time of six months.
Defending the provincial government in the writ petition and applications against the BRT project in the high court, the Advocate General (AG) Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Abdul Latif Yousafzai argued that the civil work on the project would be completed within the six months.
However, the AG cleared before the bench that the project is divided into three phases as in the first phase the civil work, which is continued day and night, will be completed within six months as claimed by the provincial government before start of the project. He submitted that the second phase of the project is operational work, in which the vehicles would be purchased to run the service and the third phase is about the leftover issues of the project.
He submitted that it was a mega project and under this project employees would be paid for three years. About the background of the project, he submitted that first the project was signed between the government of Pakistan and Asian Development Bank in 2013 and feasibility study of the project was completed in October 2016. He submitted that the federal government is guarantor between the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government and Asian Development Bank in the mega project.
He submitted that it was a mega project and that was why a grace period of 5 years had been given for the project till 2021. About the question raised in the petition that the Local Government, Peshawar, had not taken into confidence in the project, he stated that under the KP Urban and Mass Transit Act 2016, there is no need to take the local government on board on such like mega projects. Earlier, Abid Zarif, an environmentalist, who had moved an application in the main writ petition, submitted before the bench that city was paralysed due to no traffic plan for the BRT project as there was a worst traffic jam. He further submitted that 360 buildings or shops to be demolished but no notice was given to the owners under section 4 of the Land Acquisition Act and the PDA statement about getting NOC from the Cantonment Board is ambiguous, which seem that no NOC was issued to the PDA for the project. The court adjourned the case till today.