After much blame game, finally officials of the ministry of road transport and highways (MoRTH) on Sunday visited Itanagar and inspected the 45-metre damaged retaining wall near IG Park to ascertain the cause of damage and its impact on traffic movement. The visit was long overdue. The collapse of the newly constructed retaining wall has shocked the whole state. It has raised a serious question mark over the quality of NH 415 from Chandranagar to Papu Nallah.
The MoRTH team has directed the contractor and authority’s engineer to start a new retaining wall with proper design and drawing immediately. Hopefully, the PWD highway, the contractor and authority’s engineer will do a better job this time and construct a retaining with a proper design which can withstand nature’s fury. The MoRTH needs to strictly check the construction of the underpass at Bank Tinali. The project is a first of its kind in the state. It has to be world-class in order to avoid any unfortunate incident like the D Sector retaining wall collapse. The MoRTH should put pressure on the authority’s engineers to strictly check the quality of work. The job of the authority’s engineer is to monitor the work. However, it has failed to do so in the Chandranagar to Papu Nallah package. Their performance has been so poor that the PWD highway has publicly blamed it for poor work leading to collapse of the retaining wall at D Sector in Itanagar. Further, senior MoRTH officials should conduct such visits on a regular basis. With the work on Package B (Papu Nallah to Nirjuli) and Package C (Nirjuli to Banderdewa) going to start soon, the MoRTH, the PWD highway and the authority’s engineers have to develop better coordination in the coming days.