Billions of rupees wasted on Colombo outer-circular highway

COLOMBO (News 1st) - The third phase of the Colombo outer-circular highway will be constructed from Kadawatha to Kerawalapitiya spanning 9.6 km. A better part of that distance is on concrete pillars and the estimated expenditure of the highway is Rs 67bn. According to the engineers of the project, billions of rupees have been lost due to the unnecessary addition of concrete reinforcements. The Road Development Authority has accepted that there is an unnecessary expense and loss due to the increase of the width and height of concrete reinforcements. According to the officials at the Road Development Authority, the construction of the third phase of the Colombo Outer-Circular Highway was handed over to a Chinese company in 2016 but the company did not accept the conditions to reduce some of the revised costs. They further state that the government should have made a decision at the critical juncture but instead decided to bear the massive loss in order not to risk future loans from China. A long distance from Kadawatha, on the Colombo Outer-Circular Highway, has been built on these concrete reinforcements that are extraordinarily wider and is clearly distinguished between the reinforcements in Kerawalapitiya and Kadawatha. News 1st made inquiries from a retired engineer of the Road Development Authority and he revealed that the massive concrete reinforcements in the Colombo Outer-Circular Highway are commonly used in large scale constructions which carry beams over waterways with powerful currents as it is important to resist strong objects such as trees and rocks in the waterway during floods. The News 1st team asks the public: Isn't your money wasted on the construction of the third phase of the Colombo Outer-Circular highway? What is the true motive behind wasting the taxpayers' money? Isn't the public entitled to get answers for these heinous crimes that hinders their future?

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