Each time an overloaded truck rolls down a Pakistani highway, it leaves more than tyre marks. It leaves a bill. No one gives this bill to the truck owner. Rather, it falls on the government, on taxpayers and on every normal driver who strikes a pothole on a road that was supposed to last for years.
TRANSPORT REGULATIONS
Each time an overloaded truck rolls down a Pakistani highway, it leaves more than tyre marks. It leaves a bill. No one gives this bill to the truck owner. Rather, it falls on the government, on taxpayers and on every normal driver who strikes a pothole on a road that was supposed to last for years.
This is Pakistan's hidden tax, which we all pay but never see on a receipt. The story begins with a basic engineering fact. Roads are designed to withstand a specific weight or load. If the trucks exceed that weight, the damage does not increase linearly. It multiplies. This is known as the fourth power law of pavement damage and has been demonstrated by international road research organisations like the World Road Association and the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.
In simple terms, a truck 30 per cent over the legal weight limit does not inflict 30 per cent more damage. It causes almost three times the damage.
According to the National Transport Research Centre’s Axle Load Survey of 2020, about 80 per cent of freight trucks on the national highway network are overloaded. Average load on trucks is 20-40 per cent above the legal limit on the busiest routes like Peshawar-Karachi and N-5.
Almost 60 per cent of the country’s freight is carried by the N-5 alone. So, the heaviest traffic is occurring in the heaviest traffic areas, such as cement, fertiliser, sugar and construction materials, which the survey identified as the most overloaded sectors.
The result is exactly what the fourth-power law predicts. Roads designed for 10 years are failing in four-to-five years. According to the National Highway Authority (NHA)’s own estimate, the annual cost of this damage is Rs30 billion. This is not a regular repair cost. This is the price of years of overloading due to weak enforcement and governance.
The NHA is not just a government department that takes in money and spends it. It is a State-Owned Enterprise (SOE). That is, it acts like a business in some respects. It takes out loans and has its own debt and it must pay the loans, as a business would. If maintenance costs exceed its budget, the NHA cannot just request additional funds from the treasury without any restrictions. It must seek out other sources of funding.
That is what the NHA has done, turning to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) for a loan of around $320 million. Now, Pakistan is borrowing foreign money, at interest, to repair roads that were damaged due to the overloading of trucks. We are not only paying for the damage now, we are promising to continue to pay for it, with interest, in a currency that continues to become more and more expensive for us to purchase.
Pakistan is borrowing foreign money to repair roads that were damaged due to the overloading of trucks. We are not only paying for the damage now, we are promising to continue to pay for it, with interest, in a foreign currency
This is the most obvious hidden tax. It was not voted on. It was never called in a budget speech. But every citizen pays it three times: in general taxes to make up for the NHA’s deficits, in tolls and fuel costs that are not obvious and in interest on loans, such as the one from the AIIB, that future taxpayers will be responsible for repaying, whether or not they ever drive on a national highway.
Why is this continuing to happen when there are enforcement drives? The law that should prevent it is the National Highways Safety Ordinance (NHSO) 2000. This law provides for fines on overloaded trucks and even prohibits them from using the highway under Section 75 of the law. However, the fine has not been substantially changed for more than two decades. It may still be as low as PKR 5,000 per violation. That is a minor cost of doing business compared to the additional profit a trucker can make on one trip by overloading.
According to a World Bank study on freight markets in South Asia, such fines only recover less than 5.0 per cent of the profits of overloading. Overloading is the rational business decision, not the reckless one, when it is much easier to break the rule than to follow it.
There has been real progress too. The government introduced the Axle Load Control Regime (ALCR) in 2023, installing digital weigh-in-motion sensors at strategic locations and enhancing the coordination between the Ministry of Communications, the NHA and the National Highways and Motorway Police (NHMP). During 2023 alone, the NHMP issued 81,091 challans for overloading and turned back 16,884 vehicles from the highway and registered 228 criminal cases against repeat offenders.
These are actual numbers reflecting increased enforcement. The NHSO 2000 requires a maximum of 12 tons per axle and 22 tons per tandem axle, with a small 3.0 per cent tolerance at the NHA’s weigh stations.
However, ALCR only provides a truck with the maximum amount it is permitted to carry. It does not affect the amount of payment the trucker receives for carrying that legal amount. In Pakistan, freight charges are not calculated on the basis of legal weight but per trip. So, even if there is no law, a trucker makes more money when he loads up more weight. No matter how many checkpoints are added, the temptation to overload never goes away as long as this pricing remains.
The actual proposal that is being put forward is a National Weight Based Freight Tariff Regulation. In this system, the truckers would receive a fair compensation for each legal kilogramme they transport, which would be checked at the NHA’s certified weigh stations or ALCR's digital sensors. If it is a fair price and it is legal, there is no financial motivation to violate the axle-load limit. The outdated Rs5,000 fine under Section 75 needs to be raised to at least Rs50,000, with tougher penalties such as vehicle seizure for repeat offenders. Provinces also have to bridge the gap that allows overloaded trucks to easily transfer from the national highways to less-traveled provincial roads to avoid the NHA’s inspection.
This is not a normal maintenance issue for Pakistan. It is a debt issue, a fiscal issue and a fairness issue. Like any business, the NHA is having to borrow more money to fix the problems that could have been avoided in the first place by fair pricing. The incentive structure remains broken, the hidden tax increases slightly each year and the bill, inevitably, returns to the regular citizen.
The writer is an MPhil scholar at the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE).
