Royal Audit Authority (RAA) says that road maintenance works were not given importance as required in its performance audit report of road maintenance works carried out from 2013-2018.
The Department of Roads (DoR) and the regional offices experienced administrative limitations in its road maintenance planning and record keeping. The DoR carries out three types of maintenance interventions based on routine, periodic and monsoon restoration works.
The report revealed that the current Road Sector Master Plan does not provide adequate strategies to effectively manage periodic maintenance works in the country. Periodic maintenance is a group of activities which can normally be predicted and planned and are carried out periodically such as resurfacing works. During the review, it was found that there was more than 70 per cent of incomplete periodic maintenance works for primary and secondary national highways.
Thus, the RAA recommended the DoR to develop a periodic maintenance plan that will help to estimate cost and come up with long terms plans.
The review found that the DoR lacked proper maintenance planning, prioritization of roads for maintenance, assessment of achievements and challenges. This slowed down prompt decisions and improvements in performing their maintenance operations. For that reason, the RAA proposed to develop a comprehensive information management system.
Furthermore, the Audit Authority suggested to set up coordination and collaboration amongst relevant agencies during emergency situations for road maintenance which at the moment is lacking.
The review also revealed inadequacies in the hiring of machinery and equipment leading to an ineffective process of hiring. The RAA suggested the DoR to make the practices uniform across all regional offices.
Currently, the DoR maintains more than 4,500-kilometre roads in the country.
Sonam Pem
