Organiser of Road Transport In Pakistan Studies N.Z. System

Press, Volume XCI, Issue 27698, 30 June 1955, Page 3

Organiser of Road Transport In Pakistan Studies N.Z. System

A road-building programme costing nearly £2,000,000 is being undertaken in East Pakistan to provide a network of two-way metalled highways for a modern road transport service. The organiser of the service is Mr B. A. Sandal, a Colombo Plan trainee, who will leave Christchurch today after a month in the South Island with New Zealand Railways Road Services studying management, maintenance, stores and labour relations. In East Pakistan Mr Sandal will have to organise for his Government the control and operation of hundreds of motorbuses on 1200-mile routes with feeder services up to 200 miles each. Last year East Pakistan started a road construction scheme which will take five years to complete. Work is being done—at the rate of a mile (costing £1000) a day—by a company formed with shareholders in Italy and Pakistan. Fifty-one per cent, of the shares in the Pakistan-Italian Company, as it is called, are held by the Pakistan Government, and the rest by engineering interests in Italy. When the programme is complete the Pakistan Government will buy out the foreign interest. Finance for the roads is coming from the dollar earnings of the jute and cotton trade.

No Limit on Loads Chassis for buses were imported from the United Kingdom and the United States, said Mr Sandal in an interview yesterday. Bodies were designed and built for them in Pakistan. “On paper” there was a limit to the number of passengers each bus could take, but because of lack of organisation and experience the law was not carried into effect. The result was that everyone piled aboard, and “for the present” there was no enforced limitation of loads. The buses were double-deckers open at the top. a e In Christchurch Mr Sandal has visited motor-body building factories, engineering works and a rubbter factory. Pakistan has five rubber factories, but they produce only motor-cycle and bicycle tyres and tubes. Heavier tubes and tyres have to be imported. A few days ago he heard of, and then saw, for the first time a tyre-recappmg plant. He was intrigued With the process and is enthusiastic about its possible application in his own country. Mr Sandal’s task when he returns to East Pakistan in August will be to bring the country’s Government-owned and operated road transport to a high standard of efficiency. When he has done this the ‘Government will sell slightly more than half its interest in the service to private enterprise. Pakistan had greatly improved her economic position since partition with India, Mr Sandal said. The Government could now provide clothing for a Modulation of 84.000.000 inhabitants.

Formerly clothing was imported. The country was self-sufficient in sugar, matches, tobacco and newsprint (with big stands of bamboo and sandalwood producing 100 tons a day). Pakistan produced 85 per cent, of the world’s jute, but whereas previously all the product had been exported, now only 50 per cent, of it was sent overseas. The rest was used by Pakistan for her own use. Jute and cotton were the two main industries, and revenue earned by them kept the country’s works programmes going. The biggest jute factory in Asia was at Dacca, the capital of East Pakistan. The factory employed more than 10,000 persons.

Geographical Difficulty One of Pakistan’s biggest difficulties was the geographical position of the two parts of the nation with India in between. East and West Pakistan were 1150 miles apart, and the main transport for them was by direct air flights and by sea passages around the tip of India. The air service between Dacca and Karachi was carried out by Super-Constellations, and a flight took only four hours and a half. Ships travelling either way from East to West Pakistan usually touched at Colombo, Ceylon, on the way to pick up coal. The Pakistan merchant fleet had expanded from one chartered ship in 1947 to eight Government vessels, which were fully employed today. Trade through East Pakistan’s port of Chittagong had outgrown the facilities available to handle it, and a new port had been built at Chalna. One of the most favourable impressions Mr Sandal has had in New Zealand is the Dominion’s system of education. He thinks so highly of it that he plans to send one of his six children, Salim, to Canterbury University College. Salim Sandal, who is now aged 14 years and a half, will attend the college next year as an engineering student. Yesterday Mr Sandal called on the Registrar at the college (Mr J. Logie) to make arrangements for his son’s education.

‘‘l have been much impressed with New Zealand education,” he said. ‘‘lt is respectable the way children are brought up here by parents, yet there is an independence that would not apply if I sent him (Salim) to England or the United States. I feel that in your system of bringing up boys, education is more general, instead of specialising in one line.” In the last 15 years Mr Sandal has had plenty of opportunity for comparisons. Government missions have taken him to Scotland (where he served as a shipbuilding apprentice before becoming a mechanical engineer), England, Persia. Africa and Arabia. He is an expert on the organisation of river traffic.