Of good roads

E-Paper | June 13, 2026

Of late I have been travelling across Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa mostly by road. These roads are a joy to drive on. Recently I went from Islamabad to Peshawar on M-1 and returned in the evening. It rained all the way.

I could not help but notice that all the rain drops would fall on the screen, flatten out, convert into a sphere and because of the car speed would travel from the bottom of the wind screen to the roof top smoothly. These hundreds of water droplets would then convert into colourless Tadpoles with a spherical head and a long watery tail.

The M-1 road between Peshawar and Islamabad is probably the best I have travelled in Pakistan so far. The smoothness of the road can be measured by the fact that these hundreds of tadpoles would maintain their perfect vertically trajectory without anyone of them overtaking or colliding with the other. Since there are no bumps on the road, no tadpole jumps over its predecessor. Same would probably be true for M-2.

It has been exactly 15 years since M-2 was built. One hopes to see similar roads in Balochistan and Sindh where other Pakistanis can enjoy tadpoles on their windscreens during the rain.

S. NAYYAR IQBAL RAZA Karachi

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Bbbb

Dec 19, 2012 03:03am

OF BAD ROADS Did you ever travel on Multan Road in Lahore, form Cauburji to Chowk Yateem Khana? I have taken this road out of my map, and have not been there for the last 5 years. I always take alternative routes. It was like a goat track at that time. I don't know how does it look like now?

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Raheel Adnan

Dec 20, 2012 04:38am

Here you go - the mentioned road's expansion is already in progress and is targeted to be completed in a couple of months.

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kamaljit Singh

Dec 18, 2012 04:35pm

Raheel, no, your eastern neighbor has not yet such a superb road. Nor it is possible in the near future due to agitations against land acquisition for such good projects. I wonder how did you do this? World class. I hope Koreans did help ?

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Raheel Adnan

Dec 18, 2012 08:01am

To be true, overall road condition in Punjab and 'Frontier' can be considered satisfactory. I've traveled to far-offs of both provinces and most of the highways are in adequate condition. Then there are beautiful ones like Murree Express Way (it was supposed to go till Muzafarabad), Naran-Jalkhad Road (extension till Chilas is sluggish) and Motorways (original plan included 8 motorways all the way down to Karachi and Gwadar). While M2 was inaugurated 15 years ago, our eastern neighbor celebrated opening of such a passage only couple of months back.

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