Korea helps Bangladesh to develop safe roads

Korea supports Bangladesh for establishing an effective road management system which will reduce time and accidents through improving road conditions in the country. 

Transportation sector is the one of Korea’s development priority areas for Bangladesh and for this, the Asian development partner is providing a comprehensive support  to Bangladesh for developing Road & Safety Masterplan.  

Young-Ah Doh, County Director of the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) Bangladesh, made the remarks at a meeting to kickoff a project titled “Improving the reliability and safety on National Highway Corridors of Bangladesh by Introduction of ITS (Intelligent Transport Systems).” 

The KOICA Bangladesh organised the meeting on Thursday through virtual platform zoom due to current Covid-19 condition. 

Officials of KOICA Bangladesh, Roads Transport and Highways (RTHD) and Roads and Highways Department (RHD) attended the meeting aimed at promoting effective road management system which will reduce time and accidents through improving road conditions in the country. 

KOICA selected Project Management Consulting (PMC) team under 5-company-joint-supply-structure of 'Korea Expressway Corporation and Korea Transport Institute along with Soosung Engineering, S-traffic' and Winitech' also joined the meeting from South Korea 

The meeting's objective was to share the overall project aim to make road transport infrastructure of Bangladesh more safe, reliable, and sustainable, use ICT for better, efficient and effective traffic management, enhance the institutional capacity of RHD for road and traffic management and discuss the statement of work, project scope, timeline, deliverables in the project and future implementation plans with the Roads and Highways Department (RHD).  

KOICA will support a budget of $8.9 million from 2020~2023 for establishment of ITS master plan, architecture and standard, implementation of pilot project, capacity building of RHD, RTHD and other relevant organization of the government of Bangladesh. 

Md. Nazrul Islam, Secretary, RTHD, and Md. Abdus Safur, Chief Engineer of RHD shared their informative speech and requested close partnership with KOICA. 

Secretary mentioned the Road Transport & Highways Division has been working relentlessly to achieve the targets of Vision-2021, UN Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 and the goal of 2041. He also mentioned that this is a dream project for Bangladesh as ITS would be implemented for the very first time, so he requested to prepare a time-bound action plan to achieve the project goal. 

He also expressed his deep gratitude to KOICA for the ITS project.