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Turag Encroachment

Only small structures demolished

Tawfique Au
With the lean flow of the Turag remains choked with massive encroachments, a joint team of the BIWTA and Gazipur district administration yesterday changed its priority in a two-day eviction drive.
It prioritised knocking down around 60 makeshift structures, including five semi-concrete ones, at Tongi kitchen market to make room for a walkway along the river bank.
The team even spared a three-storey and a four-storey commercial building within the river's foreshores on "religious considerations."
The Turag, which stretches from Basila to Tongi, has already been reduced to a virtual sewer as demarcation pillars were wrongfully set up a couple of years ago excluding areas within the foreshore line.
On Wednesday, a director of Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority (BIWTA) instructed its officials to first remove major encroachments near Dhour Bridge in Bhakral mouza with enhanced manpower and equipment.
Backed by police, the joint team on the same day embarked on the drive and attempted to remove an enormous pile of
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sand in the river by one Major Alam and a 16000-square foot reinforced concrete wall on an area of around 36 decimals by East West University near the Dhour Bridge.
But they had to give up halfway as they lacked adequate equipment and labourers.
"We've to discuss with technical experts how to remove such a huge reinforced concrete structure and pile of sand as we can't mobilise powerful tugboat there due to half a dozen low-height bridges built over the Turag by different government authorities," said BIWTA Joint Director Saiful Islam.
Mohammad Abdus Salam, executive magistrate of Gazipur, on Wednesday said they would auction the sand used for filling up the river yesterday.
But yesterday he said they were busy with the eviction drive in Tongi and would deal with the removal of massive encroachments some other day.
The joint authorities took five years to undertake a second eviction drive at the Turag since the last one was carried out in 2009.
Two other massive encroachments near the Dhour Bridge -- Lamichha Spinning Mills and Cambrian College -
have been excluded by the BIWTA from its eviction drive. The Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakkha (Rajuk) on March 10 demolished part of the spinning mills for destroying the conservable flood flow zone.
Asked about sparing the two commercial buildings at Tongi kitchen market from the eviction drive, Harun-Or-Rashid, executive engineer of BIWTA, said those structures have been kept as one of those is a madrasa.
When this correspondent told Harun that the buildings house about 100 commercial shops and rooms for the imam and muezzin of Tongi Bazar Mosque, the BIWTA official said he heard that it was a madrasa.
On the priority to build a walkway at a time when the faulty pillars are under review by a joint secretary-led committee, BIWTA Chairman Md Samsuddoha Khandakersaid, "Pillars have been set up correctly at the Tongi kitchen market point of the river."
About the removal of massive sandfilling and knocking down the two commercial buildings run in the name of Tongi Bazar Mosque, he said he was not aware of these issues and he would make any decision in this regard only after visitingthesite.