Rapid rural appraisal of the feeder roads maintenance and improvement project, July 1987

The evaluation, a Rapid Rural Appraisal conducted by USAID/B, covered the period FY81-7/87. The project has made little or no discernible progress in institutionalizing a routine annual maintenance program. Of the 270 km of feeder roads improved or maintained by the project, none has been maintained for more than one annual work season. This is partially due to a lack of commitment to feeder road maintenance by personnel at all levels. Both field staff and local officials see road improvement as the primary objective, despite the project design"s emphasis on maintenance. Strapped by limited budgets, local officials have little incentive to invest in the long-term benefits of road maintenance. The commitment of these officials is also dampened by their exclusion from project decisionmaking. Despite plans to decentralize road selection, maintenance, and improvement decisions, these responsibilities still lie within the national-level Planning Commission, whose priorities are not necessarily those of local governments. To date, the Planning Commission has developed no strategy to address recurrent cost constraints or invest in maintenance. Two major lessons were learned. (1) The project addressed the maintenance aspect by building higher quality roads, but neglected to establish the institutional and financial commitments needed to develop a sustainable feeder road system. (2) The theory that greater investment in higher standard, paved roads will reduce maintenance costs does not seem to hold true in rural Bangladesh. Few of the roads paved under the project have enough traffic on them to justify more than a good quality dirt surface, and premature paving has resulted in increased rather than decreased maintenance costs, since not maintaining paved roads is much more expensive than maintaining them. Unmaintained paved roads deteriorated to worse than dirt road condition within 2-5 years.