The Minister of Works and Transport, Rohan Sinanan, has assured that some 500 road repair projects will be completed this financial year.
During an interview with CNC3 news last night, Sinanan identified some 500 various road projects to be tackled in an “aggressive” repair program for this year of which it has completed 50 per cent of those in the first phase.
Sinanan said this was expected to be completed by the end of March before engaging in the next phase of 250 projects.
However, he said that the program had to be halted due to the Carnival festivities.
He said: “What we’re doing is not repaving the road. We’re milling the roads and once you mill the roads, there’s a process you have to go through. What we did not want to happen, and I can give you an example, say the Western Main Road. That was earmarked for paving two weeks before Carnival. However, when you look at the WASA infrastructure, we recognised we had several WASA leaks and once we mill the road we’d have to give WASA about a week to repair it.
“So what we did not want to do is the week leading up to Carnival we have several roads which would have been milled, but we can’t pave them. So we slowed the program down one week before Carnival, this week the contractors are mobilising again, and you’d see a ramping up of that by early next week over this weekend,” he said.
Benefiting from the program, he said, were roads across the country and all the contractors under a “competitive tendering basis.”
He said the Ministry of Works and Transport was capitalising on the dry season for these works. Once completed, he hopes to return to the Minister of Finance by the mid-year budget review for additional funding “once the Minister of Finance has that money available for us.”
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