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Rejoinder, our reply
The Local Government Engineering Department (LGED) has sent a rejoinder to the report headlined "Halda dying due to dams: Salinity increases rapidly in lone natural spawning water", run by The Daily Star on April 9, claiming that the dams were not causing salinity in the spawning area.
The LGED constructed two rubber dams following requests from local people through their representatives, said the rejoinder.
The Halda rubber dam at Bhujpur is about 35 kilometres upstream from Sattarghat and the Harual Chhari rubber dam is on the Harual Chhari, a tributary of Halda river from the right side below the Bhujpu dam. Both are at the upper end of the main spawning area.
The dams are inflated in the middle of December to fill the initial storage. The river flow remains higher at that time and water in excess of use in the field spills over the dam. Later, the spill stops in February-March as water use increases.
The average dry season depth of the flow of the Halda river is only 300 mm. Had the two rubber dams not been built, this additional half-meter depth of water would meet the tidal cycles.
Also, if the volume of dry season water that would be available during a tide cycle from not building the two rubber dams is compared with the volume of tidal prism that enters from the Karnaphuli past Madunaghat, the former counts for only 0.14% of the latter - a trifling fraction that is unable to cause any impact on salinity propagation process at Madunaghat.
Regarding the operational aspect of the Bhujpur dam, the LGED rejoinder signed by the additional chief engineer said as per the memo issued by the agriculture ministry, the Halda rubber dam was deflated on May 2, 2013, impacted the fish spawning which is unusual as the Boro rice is harvested by the end of March and the dams are deflated. If it is so then we have to look into the operational aspects of the dams and we are pretty sure that we should be able to come up with a solution, making the dams operationally friendly for both rice and fish.
Our Reply
The LGED did not conduct any Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) before constructing the dams. So it is not clear how it came to know that the salinity at the mouth of the Karnaphuli, which increased after the construction of the dams, was not due to the impact of those dams.
The department conducted a feasibility study only after the Bhujpur dams came into operation.
Also, in the rejoinder the LGED itself admitted that the dry season flow of the river is very thin, less than half a meter in depth. But still those dams absolutely stopped the flow of the river, leaving around a five kilometre stretch of the Halda completely dry, which would destroy the ecology of the river.
The rejoinder also conceded that the dams are being operated in an unfriendly way for fish.
Bangladesh Environment Conservation Act, 1995 (2010 amendment), clearly mentions that the authorities concerned must conduct an EIA before taking up any development projects. The law also prohibits stopping, diverting or preventing the natural flow of a river.
In our report, it was clearly mentioned how the production of fish egg in the river dropped by 60 percent last year to 624 kg from 1,559 kg in 2012, within one year of the Bhujpur dams coming into operation. But the LGED in its rejoinder made no mention of the impact on the production of fish eggs.
Even the fisheries ministry in February formed a 12-member inter-ministerial committee composed of government officials to make recommendations about the situation of the river.