Forty Minutes to Mawa: What a Highway Actually Changes

I used to dread visiting my in-laws in Mawa. What should have been a short trip could turn into three or four hours depending on traffic, potholes, and the general chaos of the old road. Now, on the expressway, it's a genuinely pleasant forty-minute drive.

This road doesn't get the same headlines as the Padma Bridge itself, but it's part of the same story: connecting the southern and southwestern districts to Dhaka in ways that used to be unthinkable. Businesses in Khulna and Barisal now move goods to the capital in a fraction of the time it used to take, and that has real economic effects on prices and market access that ordinary families feel even if they never think about the highway itself.

I try to remind people, especially now, when so much political conversation is dominated by what's gone wrong, that this kind of infrastructure doesn't build itself and doesn't happen by accident. It takes years of planning, financing, and follow-through, and a lot of that follow-through happened under governments that don't always get remembered for the boring parts of governing well.