Every day thousands of commuters in buses, trucks, taxis and other vehicles are forced to take the run-down road to commute to the old city avoiding the city centre traffic. The Gabtoli end of the 30-kilometre road from Tongi to Kellar Mor seems like a ride on the surface of the moon, where both vehicles and passengers are constantly at risk of breaking down and sustaining injuries.

The Water Development Board (WDB) built the road on the Dhaka Flood Protection Embankment in 2003. Despite its bad shape, the road is used by thousands of people in Mohammadpur, Rayerbazar, Hazaribagh, Kamrangirchar, Nawabpur, Chawkbazar, Lalbagh, Swari Ghat, Babubazar and Sadarghat areas. People prefer this shortcut to their destination rather than entering the city roads, which are always choked with traffic.

If the road is made usable for normal traffic, residents in the western part of the city could travel to Sadarghat in minutes. They could also reach the Savar highway, avoiding traffic snarls on the Mirpur Road. Normally from Dhanmondi, it takes over an hour to reach Sadarghat through the congested city during daytime.

The bypass winds its way around the western fringe of the city ensuring a traffic-free passage to those areas. Ever since it was built, lack of maintenance has encouraged encroachers to build shops, markets, mosques and slums on it, almost choking the thoroughfare mainly used by the commoners. Had the VIPs used the bypass, the authorities would never have allowed it to become so bad, locals said.

The Superintendent Engineer of WDB's Operations and Maintenance Circle, Mujibur Rahman Khan blamed the Dhaka City Corporation (DCC) for "destroying the road" at Gabtoli end. He said that for over two years DCC has illegally chosen a vast area along the bypass to dump wastes.

Heavy garbage trucks dumped rubbish along the road where mechanical earth removers worked day and night to level the surface after the trucks unloaded the rubbish. The plying of such heavy vehicles soon removed the surface of the road exposing the earthen core and creating large ditches.

"They (DCC) have not only destroyed this important road but also polluted the environment of the area by dumping thousands of tonnes of garbage," the WDB superintendent engineer said.

"We officially asked the DCC not to dump rubbish along the road but they ignored our request and kept dumping rubbish using heavy earth removers," Khan said.

DCC's Waste Management Division officials however said that they had stopped dumping rubbish at Gabtoli embankment area over a month ago. "We have moved the site to a far away area in Aminbazar where sanitary landfill is in force," said an official requesting anonymity.

Sources said that the WDB has no priority in funding the maintenance of the road. Since it was built the WDB has not looked into the importance of the road. Most of the allocation for its maintenance was spent on tree plantation on the slopes of the embankment but over 95 percent of those plants never survived due to lack of maintenance.

Unwilling to spend anything in the maintenance of the bypass, the WDB recently requested Dhaka Wasa to incorporate the repair costs of the road at Gabtoli end into Wasa's pump house project at Kalyanpur. WDB even suggested Wasa to show the road repair in their project expenditure as the job of an 'approach road' to the pump house. Wasa is now considering the request.

Mohammad Qaiyum, a bus driver from Gabtoli, told this correspondent that every day from dawn-to-dusk he has to make at least 20 trips between Gabtoli and Kellar Moar on this road. "My vehicle breaks down every day and I have become sick of negotiating with such ditches and potholes on this road," Qaiyum said.