Dhanmondi Residential Area was a spot through which this dense city literally breathed. There was a lot of green and a lake to boot — and low houses on one-blgha plots. Passing a forlorn life of deserted looks for two decades — because of the owning families migrating to the west and down under — Dhanmondi RA, now given out almost wholly to real estate developers. is threatening Dhaka with a horrible concrete slum without water and electricity. The 600 acres of land taken over for the residential area was planned to house 2,000 households. A Daily Star report on the situation there says, there will be 25,000 households there in five years'time. Well, people can huddle together even more.than this and compete with sardines but they will need light and power, water and sewerage. Dhanmondi then will have a load of 80,000 people to the square kilometre.

If this is what would befall Dhanmondi, what will happen to the crowded parts? What is the optimum load that a part of the city can take? Dhaka now has about 10,000 people to the square kilometre. Imagine it growing to double that and the sky would seem to come down. But that is what we are heading for and very fast indeed. Is it a beginning of the end of Dhaka? Has the government nothing to do in this respect? Doesn't the people — its intelligentsia and its professionals — have any role in stemming the rot?

The interminable influx from the villages, not unlike Chaplin's Goldrush, must be stopped. By, of course, making the villages liveable. Pauperisation through built-in social and economic exploitation must be stopped first then. Insecurity due to moneyed villagers and their sons degenerating into gangsters, must go. Village populations must again develop society.

But this is an ideal realisable only after decades of all-out effort. What happens in the meantime?

We were very happy when government decided to give lump sum loans to Dhaka's floating population — slumdwellers mainly — to get back to the villages and begin life anew. But this alone would not be enough. As a matter of principle no labour-intensive agency or Industry should be allowed to open in Dhaka. These must be spread throughout the nation.

Let Dhaka be a city of zero industry and let industrial cities grow on new grounds equitably throughout the nation.