It began as another routine parliamentary oversight meeting, but it quickly turned into a raw and uncomfortable reckoning for Pakistan’s National Highway Authority. In Islamabad, the National Assembly Standing Committee on Communications summoned NHA Chairman Asadullah Khan to explain why major road projects remained unfinished and why the public was being left to suffer on crumbling highways. The most explosive issue was the Sukkur-Shikarpur road, known as N-65, a vital artery in Sindh that has become a symbol of official neglect. Committee members were visibly angry when they were presented with an NHA report describing the road’s condition as “satisfactory.” To anyone who had actually driven on it, this was not just inaccurate; it was offensive. The road remains riddled with cracks, potholes, and dangerous stretches that have caused frequent accidents, particularly at night and during the monsoon season. For ordinary people, the road is not a bureaucratic statistic—it is the route they take to work, to hospitals, to markets, and to see their families. Every bump and broken patch is a reminder that the state has failed to keep a basic promise. The NHA chairman, who had recently been reinstated after being removed from his post, offered a personal apology, but he apologized mostly for the false comfort of the report, not for the road itself. That distinction mattered to the lawmakers, who could feel the heat from their constituents. Their constituents were not reading official summaries; they were living with the consequences of years of delay, poor materials, and substandard workmanship. The apology, however sincere, did little to calm the growing sense that the road had become a dangerous joke in official circles while ordinary citizens paid the price in time, money, and sometimes their lives.
The anger sharpened when the committee delved into the details of the NHA’s reporting. Muhammad Sheharyar, a committee member, did not hide his frustration. “We, being public representatives, are facing the wrath of the people because of the dilapidated condition of the road, while NHA officials are claiming otherwise,” he said. His voice carried the exhaustion of someone who has to stand before voters and explain why a government highway has been allowed to rot for years. He reminded the NHA that at the previous meeting, the authority had been given two months to repair the road. Nothing happened. Worse, instead of owning the failure, the NHA submitted a report that contradicted the lived experience of every driver using that route. Sheharyar demanded action against the officials who prepared what he called a false report, insisting that this was a matter of respect for Parliament itself. When committee chairman Ijaz Jakhrani tried to move on to the next agenda item, Agha Rafiullah, a PPP lawmaker, stopped him cold. “Do you just want to finish the agenda of the meeting or resolve the issue?” he asked. Rafiullah then brought up a sharper point: Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi had recently observed that the country’s system had virtually collapsed due to a lack of governance. Rafiullah argued that the NHA’s behavior was a textbook example of that collapse. It was not just a road problem; it was a governance problem. When public institutions stop telling the truth about their own failures, every other system begins to rot. The committee’s role was not to rubber-stamp official narratives but to force accountability. The members were not interested in a polished PowerPoint presentation. They wanted to know why the public was being treated with contempt, why deadlines were ignored, and why the people closest to the problem were being dismissed as irrelevant. In that room, the technical jargon evaporated, and what remained was a very human fight between those who were supposed to serve the public and those who were supposed to hold them to account.
Beneath the immediate anger over N-65, a deeper structural problem surfaced: the way contracts are awarded and projects are managed. Rafiullah pointed out that too often, contracts were handed out without adequate planning, without proper technical assessments, and without any serious feasibility study. The result was predictable—substandard construction, wasted public money, and roads that fall apart within months. This is not a question of bad luck or difficult weather. It is a question of institutional discipline. Before any project is launched, there should be a clear understanding of soil conditions, expected traffic loads, drainage needs, and long-term maintenance costs. None of that can be improvised after the fact. When planning is weak, contractors cut corners, engineers look the other way, and auditors are left to count the rubble. The committee’s response was to demand a comprehensive, project-wise report from the NHA, identifying every case where construction has been substandard or where projects were undertaken without adequate planning. The report was to include complete details for each project: pre-contract planning, feasibility studies, surveys, soil investigations, load evaluations, technical assessments, construction standards, and post-completion evaluation criteria. In other words, they wanted a full accounting, not just of where the money went, but of the technical thought that should have guided it. The committee stressed that the report must clearly show the procedures and standards followed before contracts were awarded and after projects were completed. Only then could there be accountability, and only then could future mistakes be prevented. The demand was ambitious, perhaps even idealistic, but it reflected a genuine desire to shift the culture from improvisation to planning. Without that cultural shift, every new highway project would simply be another opportunity to repeat the same expensive failures. The committee was not asking for miracles. It was asking for a basic professional standard that should have applied from the beginning.
The committee also turned its attention to another glaring problem in the NHA’s administrative machinery: the absence of capable leadership in key posts. It noted that the previous General Manager at Sukkur had been suspended in September 2026, and since then, no suitable replacement had been posted. The committee directed the NHA to immediately place a capable and competent general manager at Sukkur, and to share the posting orders with the committee. This might sound like a small bureaucratic detail, but in practice it matters enormously. Without a strong local manager, ongoing construction work stalls, coordination between contractors collapses, and small problems become emergencies. The Sukkur office oversees some of the most critical highway infrastructure in the province, including the N-65 corridor. Leaving that office without a permanent leader is like sending a ship to sea without a captain. The committee understood that a failure to fill key positions is not an accident; it is a form of administrative sabotage. When a post remains vacant for months, the system loses its institutional memory. Files pile up, decisions are delayed, and local grievances go unheard. Meanwhile, the people who should be doing the work find clever ways to avoid responsibility. The committee’s insistence on seeing the posting orders was a way of ensuring that this time, the NHA would not simply nod and then do nothing. They wanted proof, not promises. There was also a human dimension: the people of Sukkur and the surrounding areas had been waiting for action for a long time. They deserved a leader who could understand their needs, who could be reached, and who could make decisions on the ground rather than hiding behind a desk in Islamabad. The committee was effectively saying that governance is not just about policies and budgets; it is about having the right people in the right place at the right time.
The discussion then shifted to another masterpiece of delay: the Dera Murad Jamali Bypass. MNA Sardar Yaqoob Khan raised the issue, noting that the project had remained incomplete for twenty years. Twenty years. In that time, children had been born, grown up, and started having children of their own. Governments had come and gone. Entire generations of officials had collected salaries. Yet the bypass remained unfinished. Yaqoob Khan pointed out that the NHA had awarded contracts for different segments of the project to several different contractors, but could not build even a five-kilometer stretch of the road in one continuous effort. This is not a story of engineering difficulty; it is a story of institutional fragmentation. Every time a segment contractor failed or a dispute arose, the project was parceled out to someone new, resetting the clock. There was no overarching vision, no single entity accountable from start to finish. The result was a perpetual construction site, a landscape of half-built embankments, rusted machinery, and broken promises. When the chairman was confronted with this appalling record, he gave a response that suggested he had exhausted his capacity for meaningful explanation. He asked the committee members to legislate on the matter. That was a stunning deflection. The lawmakers were not there to write a law for a bypass; they were there to ask why the executive branch had failed to execute an existing project. One member immediately shot back that this was an internal issue of NHA planning and demanded to know why the chairman needed legislation to do his own job. The chairman’s remark seemed to be a tactic, perhaps born of frustration, but it betrayed a deeper problem: an unwillingness to accept responsibility for the administrative choices that had produced such a disaster. The committee was not going to let him off the hook by pretending that the issue required a constitutional amendment. It required, instead, a simple commitment to managing projects honestly, transparently, and with a real deadline.
In the end, the meeting was about more than one road or one bypass. It was a microcosm of a wider crisis in public service delivery. The gap between official reports and ground reality has become so wide that ordinary citizens no longer trust what they are told by government institutions. When an authority says a road is satisfactory and the people drive on that road every day, the lie is not just an error; it is an insult. The committee’s insistence on a comprehensive report, its demand for a new general manager, and its refusal to let the NHA chairman escape with a flippant answer were all attempts to restore some dignity to the relationship between the state and the citizen. There is a deeper human need at play here. People want to be heard. They want their suffering to be acknowledged. They want the institutions that serve them to tell the truth, even when the truth is ugly. The lawmakers, for all their political differences, stood together on this point: the public cannot be governed by false comfort. The NHA chairman’s reinstatement may have given him a second chance, but the committee made it clear that this second chance came with sharp conditions. He must provide real data, real timelines, and real accountability. He must ensure that the false reports stop, that the competent managers are posted, and that projects like the Dera Murad Jamali Bypass are either completed or explained in detail. The public will be watching. They always are, because they are the ones who must drive on these roads, pay for these projects with their taxes, and suffer the consequences of every decision made in their name. The meeting in Islamabad was a reminder that governance is not an abstraction. It is a promise between the people and their institutions. That promise cannot be kept with substandard construction, dishonest assessments, or absurd requests for legislation when executive responsibility is already clear. The only way to repair the trust is to repair the roads, and to repair the road, one must first be honest about the potholes. The committee took one significant step in that direction. Whether the NHA will take the next step remains to be seen, but the message from Parliament has been delivered clearly: the time for excuses is over, and the time for accountability has begun.