Gamgadhi-Mugu road handed over

By Rajan Rawat,Humla, Dec. 16: The road connecting Gamgadhi, the district headquarters of Mugu, with Deuli in Chankheli Rural Municipality, Humla, which was built with the financial support from the British government, has been formally handed over to Karnali Province.

 Chief Minister Jeevan Bahadur Shahi accepted the road on behalf of the provincial government on Thursday.

The 67-kilometre road was built at a cost of Rs. 1.66 billion. Of its total length, 33 kilometres lie in Mugu and 34 kilometres in Humla.

As per the Infrastructure Development Office of Humla, more than 4,400 local labourers worked on the road which took four years to complete. 

  Of the total number of people employed, 35 per cent were women and they were paid the same wage as their male counterparts. According to the office, at the end of construction, each labourer was able to take home around Rs. 800,000.

The road was constructed under the third phase of the Rural Access Programme, which is funded by UK Aid through the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID). 

Speaking at the hand-over ceremony, Chief Minister Shahi recalled how he first took the road at the age of seven while walking to Nepalgunj. “It used to take us a month to reach the Terai on foot,” he remembered.

“We can now drive vehicles on the same road we once needed to make tiring walks on,” he expressed.

Shahi also called roads a pre-requisite for development and said that road access helped people fulfil their needs.  

British Ambassador to Nepal Nicola Pollitt also spoke on the occasion and said that the Gamgadhi-Deuli road would connect Humla with the national road network. She also informed that this was the longest rural road Britain had helped build in Nepal. She claimed that the road would bring food prices down by 43 per cent and would make services like health accessible to the locals.