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Dying Buriganga cries out for help

MORSHEDALIKHAN
Exactly seven years ago a manmade disaster struck the villages around Rayer Bazar across the vast low-lying land along the river Buriganga. The Water Development Board and the Dhaka WASA diverted 2,000 cubic meters of daily tannery wastes into fresh areas in the upstream of the river Buriganga. The reason was that of visionless management of the environment at a phenomenal cost from the public exchequer. For nearly a hundred years the toxic tannery waste had found its way into the river Buriganga through a natural canal at Lalbagh in the downstream. This obviously polluted a vast area including the river. But things went wrong at the land management level. On the canal that carried the bulk of the waste from Hazaribagh tanneries, a money-hungry desperado started building a new tannery unit. To the by-standing officials of the WDB and DWASA's sewerage experts the unit meant a disaster. Yet they remained mysteriously quiet. There was no word about what would happen to the deadly wastes.
The WDB quickly came up with a solution. They built a sluice gate on the embankment at Rayer Bazar and soon the vast low-lying areas had nothing to offer. Day and night thousands of cubic meters of toxic wastesstarted flowing into fresh areas that was naturally gifted with a rich biodiversity. Fishes disappeared and the land during lean period stopped producingcrops. Thousands of villagers in Basila,
Waispur, Looterchar, Jhaochar and Kholamora suddenly found themselves cut off from the river on which they had depended for generations. The area that only the other day produced enough fish for the western part of the city, had suddenly nothing left. The tales of egg-laden prawns, puthis, Baillya, bain, boal, shoul, gozar, ruhi and kali baus are today a matter of nostalgia among the villagers. The damage had been done.
Tannery onslaught on the Buriganga is only a tiny part of a sad story about a river that had been serving millions for hundreds of years. According to an estimate done by environmentalists, as each day passes the river Buriganga receives another 10,000 cubic meters of wastes from thousands of informal and formal industries along its banks. The city with an official population of ten million can provide proper sewerage management for only two million people. The remaining untreated sewage, generated by eight million inhabitants flows into the river Buriganga directly.
From Kholamora up to Fatulla, the river Buriganga accommodates one of the busiest river ports in the world. At Sadarghat launch terminal, on an average every day 30,000 passengers arrive from different destinations and another 30,000 depart. The 200 passenger vessels using the port, in addition to thousands of cargo vessels, share a common offence. In the absence of any guideline and awareness among transport workers, these vessels willfully spill oil into the river. The river water Near Sadarghat bears the testimony of the spill with
patches of oil floating on the surface amid a lifeless river.
In January 2002, when the Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority (BIWTA) officials talked about dredging the river Buriganga little did they know what they were confronted with. According to BIWTA experts, a mechanised dredger would not be able to operate on the stretch between the two bridges of Babu Bazar and Gandaria. For up to ten feet on the bed of the river, millions of tons of polythene bags, discarded coconut shells and other solid wastes have been deposited amid a sludge that could not be removed mechanically.
So far successive governments have shown more interest in removing some of the 1,300 listed encroachments from the river Buriganga. BIWTA officials, who now claim the custody of the 17-kilometer stretch of the river, seem quite eager to recover the river shores from illegal encroachments. But none is talking about containing the massive pollution on the river. Earlier this year the authorities were directed by the Prime Minister to relocate the tannery units elsewhere with common waste treatment plants. The relocation remains a far cry, as the influential tannery owners have put forward conditions for relocations that are too extravagant for an apparently cash constrained state.
Meanwhile, the lifeline of the city continues to head towards suffocation.