Paper Title
PROJECT SCHEDULE DELAYS AND CIRCULAR EFFECTS OF SOCIO-ECONOMIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS - A CASE OFBANGLADESHI MEGA PROJECTS

Abstract
Abstract - To improve the human lifestyle and massively change the social economy, the world is moving towards building mega projects that keep the country’s economic balance and make human life easy and reliable. Although it significantly influences regional identity and megaproject culture, it concerns the government, stockholders, and owners regarding cost and budgets. Megaprojects play a crucial role by establishing connections among numerous public and private stakeholders, with the bulk of expenses being shouldered by companies invested in their success. Moreover, these projects allocate substantial annual expenditures of approximately 6-9 trillion USD, marking the most significant investment in human history. This research paper investigated two major top-tier megaprojects of Bangladesh, The Padma Bridge and the Dhaka Metro Rail project schedule delays and the Circular Effects of Economic and Environmental Impacts. The Padma Bridge and Dhaka Metro Rail Project are essential because these are the most sensitive and expensive projects in Bangladesh’s History. Furthermore, there is no research before about these two mega projects. They cost US$3.6 billion for the Padma Bridge and approximately US$2.8 billion for the Metro Rail. We will find out the factors of the schedule delays of the projects, do qualitative analysis from site surveys and sentiment analysis of open media sources on different issues, and emphasize how to evaluate the risk factors and reduce them via engineering management and developing human resources. The dataset was collected from authentic sources involved directly in the projects. This includes 20 engineers and 40 perceived beneficiaries of a specified number of that location. Different data preprocessing techniques, lexicon, and removal of stopwords have been applied. They used a purposive sampling method and a mixed method for the survey. The researcher has used qualitative analysis and sentiment analysis to find the factors of the megaprojects’ schedule delays and their socio-economic and environmental impacts. Comparatively, the two methods give positive and negative results overall. From sentiment analysis, the ratio is 3:2 for the Dhaka metro rail project and 4:1 for the Padma Bridge project. A qualitative approach has been used whereby a semi-structured interview has been conducted with 60 participants. The interview audio has been recorded and preserved where possible. The qualitative analysis was performed on different groups of participants. The participant groups are engineers, contractors, sub-contractors, and construction workers directly and indirectly related to projects. According to sustainability footprint, there are some impacts of megaproject schedule delays, such as Inadequate information about the project, lack of interest of contractors, Poor communication among internal members, Lack of experience of our local engineers, Frequent Design changes, and Poor Planning of the Project. By minimizing the circular effects of project schedule delays and their impact on sustainability footprints, mega projects will embrace them by following these steps: Implementing advanced technologies, Sustainable Materials and Practices, Robust monitoring and control systems, Collaborative risk management. The Padma Bridge and metro rail projects are the most expensive and critical for Bangladesh. They are public-private partnership projects and have many channels with high-profile individuals. As a result, it could not collect fully authentic data practically from the engineers, contractors, sub-contractors, and different participant groups. Keywords - Bangladeshi Mega Projects; project schedule delays and cost overrun; Natural Language Processing; qualitative Analysis; sustainability footprint; Megha Project Delay