Seventy-year-old Ambikanath Upadhyay of Chaukot, Kavre, still remembers late BP Koirala, first democratically-elected prime minister of Nepal, laying the foundation for his ambitious Banepa-Sindhuli-Bardibas road at Shrikhandapur.”It used to take 3-4 days to reach Sindhuli earlier. But the roads helped shorten the time,” said Upadhyay.BP laid the foundation for the road. But after the parliamentary system dissolved, this project was pushed to the backburner. The Tribhuwan Highway was accorded greater priority and this project was interrupted,” he said.He believes those who ran the Panchayat System were bent on hindering the construction of BP Highway.”They feared the popularity Nepali Congress party, to which BP belonged, would gain after the highway’s completion. Had the Panchayat System not interrupted the constructions, the mid-hills would have been prosperous by now,” added Upadhyaya.Back then there were no dozers and excavators. The path had to be cut through the hills and paved with manual labor.

“People carried soil and stones in wicker baskets. There were only two machines for breaking the boulders” he said.The road never fell under anyone’s priority during the Panchayati regime or even when multi-party democracy took hold in the country. But after the flooding in 1963 destroyed bridges along the Prithivi Highway and the Tribhuwan Highway, Kathmandu was cut off from the Tarai for 20 days. This resulted in the government and others taking the B P Highway seriously as an alternative to the other highways linking Tarai.Although the constructions were carried out in different phases after 1995, late Nepali Congress leader Girija Prasad Koirala laid foundation for the highway again on June 10, 1998 at Dhulikhel.

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