KATHMANDU: Locals in and around Balkot, Sirutar Bridge and Upayogi Chowk of Suryabinayak Municipality-1 in Bhaktapur district have been facing difficulty in movement due to lack of timely construction and maintenance of the damaged Sirutar-Biruwa road.

It has been long Sirutar-Biruwa road is left high and dry- all full of hassles and inconvenience to the people.

The locals blame the gross negligence on the part of contractor and indifference of the people’s representatives. Mud, puddles and pits on the road afflict them.

Pits as huge as the size of buffalo-wallowing pond are developed on the road connecting Balkot with Sirutar.

Contractor Susan Maharjan allegedly visits the site once a month and employs very less workers at the site which has sluggish construction, the locals fumed, adding that it was still raining, thereby, affecting the sluggish works.

Bhup Lal Giri, one among the irate locals, shared that many scooters and motorcycles fall into the ditch on a daily basis along this road since over 1,000 households of Dadhikot’s Biruwa to Sirutar use the road daily on average.

There is no alternative to this road at present, said Giri, ruing, “From pedestrian to small vehicles suffer much as those puddles and ditches are fraught with risks of road accidents.”

The World Wide and P.R. Susan JV Lalitpur were awarded the contract to build the road at the cost of Rs 506 million.

The deadline for the said road project expired on June 29 this year, but the non-implementation of contract dismayed the locals.

“We repeatedly requested the contactor company to fill the puddles with gravel but to no avail,” he lamented.

Similarly, Hari Raut of Raut Gaun ranted that even though parliamentarians and ward chairperson commute via this road daily, they turn a blind eye to the sorry state of the road. Angrily, he said the people’s representatives were not piling pressure on the contractor for timely completion of the road construction.

“We are afflicted much with inconvenience,” he grieved.

Bagmati Province Assembly member Sashi Jung Thapa informed that the contractor company had pledged to start blacktopping of the road by the beginning of upcoming festival Dashain which begins from 26th of this month.

Another road was under-construction at Sirutar and Dadhikot at the cost of Rs 210 million and all the roads were being constructed by the same contractor, he said.

Refuting the locals’ allegation, he explained, “We are exerting pressure on the contractor to finish the project at the earliest. We understand the negligible number of workers and inconsistency in construction works contributed to the delay.”