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Japan to help improve livelihood of people in flood-prone areas

Govt takes project for haor, char areas in 8 districts

STAFF CORRESPONDENT
The government will start implementation of a project from next year to improve livelihood of the people in flood-prone haor and char areas in eight districts with the assistance of Japan.
.Md Zahangir Alam, director of the project, yesterday told a seminar on, "Approach of rural livelihood development in flood-prone area" jointly organised by JICA and Local Government Engineering Division (LGED) at the LGED seminar room at Agargaon in the city.
A five-year project will be implemented according to a study conducted in 2002-2003 by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) on the livelihood of the people in flood-prone areas in four haor and four char areas of eight districts, Zahangir said.
The four haor districts are Sunamganj, Netrokona, Kishoreganj and Habiganj and four other districts are Gaibandha, Sirajganj, Jamalpur and Bogra, he said.
Zahangir said a two-year pilot project on the basis of the study is already being implemented at Aglarchhora village under Fulchhari upazila in Gaibandha and Goraigram village under Nikley upazila in Kishoreganj. The pilot project for the villages include construction of wave protection wall in the haor areas, raising the height of land dumping earth, sinking some tube-wells for safe drinking water and providing Tk 5,000 micro-credit each in the villages.
A JICA team from Japan will visit the main project implementation work in August that will begin in haor and char areas next year. The estimated cost of the project is Tk 125 crore which will be provided by Japan, he added.
State Minister for LGRD and Cooperatives Ziaul Haque Zia attended the inaugural session of the seminar as chief guest while the Japanese Ambassador Matsushiro Horiguchi was present as special guest with LGED chief engineer Md Shahidul Hassan in the chair.
Zia in his speech urged Japan to include more neglected and poverty-prone districts of the country in such projects. He also thanked Japan for multi-sectoral
assistance in Bangladesh.
Horiguchi underscored the need for greater development and policy interventions for the inhabitants of char and haor areas. He said the livelihood of the people in haor and char areas needs to be improved through skill training programmes in cooperation with
the local NGos.
JICA resident representative in Bangladesh Akio Arai and David Wood, head, Department for International Development (DFID), also spoke at the seminar.
Later, a technical session was held on the subject at the seminar.