RAJSHAHI: Works on around Taka 400 crore footpath and road construction are progressing fast in Rajshahi city in order to make its pedestrian movement unhindered together with ensuring beautification, reports BSS.

“We are constructing 20 kilometers of footpaths with financial support from Indian government”, said Ashraful Haque, Chief Engineer of Rajshahi City Corporation (RCC), here on Tuesday.

Many other works like land acquisition, road widening and expansion, drain and footpath construction and beautification of those are going on.

There will be no any road and street in the metropolis where there will be no footpath.  Thereby, pedestrian movement will be easier side by side with ensuring beautification.

“We will decorate all the footpaths with colourful tiles in phases,” Engineer Ashraful Haque added. Upon successful completion of the works by June next, the venture will be the epoch-making step of the city's development field.

More than 32,000 poor and slum households are enjoying sanitation facilities by dint of commissioning of 11,000 hygienic latrines in the metropolis.

Similarly, they are getting facilities of safe drinking water from 2,300 tube-wells installed in the slum areas besides different other settlement improvement privileges like footpaths and drains.

The city authorities have long been carrying out tree plantation and promotion of good practices for improving air quality and maintaining environment, said Mosaddique Hossain Bulbul, Mayor of RCC.

“We planted more than 5,000 trees on 10-kilomter roads and encouraged citizens for building fruit orchards.

The corporation won the prime minister's national award for tree plantation in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2013,” he said.

“The city corporation is also implementing a project titled ‘Zero soil’ to cover all the available top soils with green and various trees,” Mayor Bulbul said adding that more than 14,000 Neem tree saplings were distributed among school students free of cost recently for transplantation.

The corporation is constructing footpaths covering the open soil on roadsides, improving the drainage system, increasing mango orchards and beefing up the cleansing operations, the mayor said.

RCC's existing practice of nighttime household waste and garbage removal and dumping those to a remote place has also a significant contribution to reducing environmental pollution.