Road construction minister Nand Kishore Yadav. Picture by Nagandra Kumar Singh

Patna, May 20: The road construction department has decided to set up 11 circle-level labs to check the quality of roads in the state.

Road construction minister Nand Kishore Yadav announced this on the sidelines of his janata darbar at the state BJP office today.

Yadav said the decision has been taken to ease pressure on the sole road quality lab in the state capital — the department has constructed over 10,000km of roads in the past five years — and check the quality of the roads effectively.

The minister said: “The work load of the department has gone up in the past five years. Considering the length of the roads that have already been constructed and the ones which will be constructed in the days to come, there is an urgent need to have the means to effectively check the quality of the roads. The laboratories at the circle level will be of a great help on this front.”

These 11 quality control labs will be set up at Saharsa, Purnea, Muzaffarpur, Hajipur, Patna, Ara, Gaya, Bhagalpur, Darbhanga, Dehri-on-Sone and Chhapra.

“Construction of these labs is under way and four of them have already been constructed. “We have set a timeframe for completing the construction work of the labs. Majority of them would be available for use before the end of the current fiscal (2011-12),” said Yadav.

He added: “There are laboratories of the department at the divisional level but most of these are either in bad shape or don’t have the latest equipment to test the quality of roads. The divisional-level laboratories test the quality of the roads manually and it takes quite some time to find the results, leading to a delay in getting the report.”

Keeping with the state government’s drive against corruption, the department has also decided to impl- ement a major change in functioning of its quality control wing.

Commenting on the decision, Yadav said: “From now, separate executive engineers would be engaged in quality control and road construction work. Earlier, both these works were looked after by the same person and so there was a chance for the report being unfair. The quality control wing scans the quality of work done by the engineers so it would not be appropriate to engage the same engineers in the road construction work.”

The minister said the decision has been taken to check corruption in the department and to strengthen the in-house quality control wing. “There has to be transparency in any department. This is the reason that we have taken this decision, as eliminating corruption from the state is the top priority of the NDA government,” he said.