KEVON FELMINE

Se­nior Re­porter

kevon.felmine@guardian.co.tt

Min­is­ter of Works and Trans­port Ro­han Sinanan says the Min­istry of Works and Trans­port (MOWT) has un­der­tak­en more than 500 road im­prove­ment projects in fis­cal 2023, with most of the spend­ing on Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress-rep­re­sent­ed con­stituen­cies.

With road protests erupt­ing through­out the coun­try in 2022, Sinanan had promised an ag­gres­sive road-paving pro­gramme in 2023 as COVID-19 re­stric­tions end­ed. With MOWT reach­ing its mark by Sep­tem­ber, he said the pro­gramme con­tin­ued in­to the cur­rent fis­cal year with a sim­i­lar tar­get. Sinanan said road projects oc­cur every day, in­clud­ing road paving, land­slip re­pairs, cul­vert re­place­ments and re­tain­ing wall and drainage con­struc­tion. He said this was the first time in T&T that so much was tak­ing place af­ter a Na­tion­al Bud­get, as min­istries usu­al­ly had to wait for fund­ing. How­ev­er, work con­tin­ued be­cause the MOWT al­ready had a pro­gramme in place.

While some MPs and lo­cal gov­ern­ment rep­re­sen­ta­tives ac­cused the Gov­ern­ment of ge­o­graph­i­cal dis­crim­i­na­tion re­cent­ly, Sinanan said he tries to sep­a­rate the work from pol­i­tics.

“If I look at it in terms of our bud­get, we would have spent more mon­ey in some of the ar­eas con­trolled by the Op­po­si­tion, and that is on­ly be­cause some of those ar­eas have dif­fer­ent soil types. You look at some ar­eas, you have land­slips oc­cur­ring dai­ly. We can­not say that it is an Op­po­si­tion area, so we are not fix­ing it,” Sinanan said.

It in­cludes con­stituen­cies like Moru­ga and Princes Town, but Sinanan said the MOWT looks at the ar­eas that need work and not at who con­trols the con­stituen­cy. He said the prob­lem along the North Coast road dif­fers from those pass­ing through the Cen­tral Range, and those are con­sid­er­a­tions when ad­dress­ing work. He said MOWT’s Face­book page shows the work they do dai­ly.

“So this pro­gramme will con­tin­ue based on the avail­abil­i­ty of fund­ing, but as we speak, we have sev­er­al roads be­ing re­ha­bil­i­tat­ed around the coun­try, and as I said, this pro­gramme will con­tin­ue.”

He not­ed the MOWT’s paving of roads in Port-of-Spain this week is part of a pro­gramme to re­ha­bil­i­tate all the roads in the cap­i­tal.

How­ev­er, he said the pro­gramme en­tails work on roads around the coun­try, in­clud­ing some un­der the var­i­ous mu­nic­i­pal cor­po­ra­tions, main roads and high­ways. Sev­er­al units of the MOWT, in­clud­ing the Pro­gramme for Up­grad­ing Road Ef­fi­cien­cy and the Sec­ondary Road Re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion Im­prove­ment Com­pa­ny, are ex­e­cut­ing the pro­gramme.

“There was road paving tak­ing place two nights ago. We can­not do every­thing at once be­cause there will al­ways be chal­lenges like fund­ing and re­sources. We have a pro­gramme on­go­ing. That pro­gramme will con­tin­ue un­til we ad­dress all the roads in Trinidad over a pe­ri­od.”

Sinanan said the avail­abil­i­ty of fund­ing de­ter­mines the ex­tent of the MOWT pro­gramme cou­pled with ca­pac­i­ty chal­lenges.