The Awami League government has failed to protect Dhaka’s greatest and most abused asset – the Buriganga River.
The Buriganga River is a lifeline for millions of Bangladeshis living in the country’s capital. In fact, Dhaka’s 12 million inhabitants are all affected every day by the pollution that threatens to destroy their main source of drinking water, fish and transportation. According to Human Rights Watch, residents in slums that border the Buriganga regularly suffer from fevers, skin diseases, respiratory problems, and diarrhea.
And yet AL’s Shipping minister, Shajahan Khan, has admitted that the government has been unable to stop Dhaka City Corporation and the Water Supply and Sewerage Authority from dumping the city’s solid and liquid waste into the river. About 20,000 tons of tannery waste – including highly toxic materials – are dumped into the river every day.
While a taskforce was set up by the government to save the river by relocating the tanneries outside the capital and asking illegal encroachers to vacate the riverbanks, they never actually enforced it due to political inefficiency and corruption.
When asked about the proper cleaning of industrial wastes, government officials have said that all the industries near the Buriganga are illegal and the owners do not pay regular tax, which means that it is not the Dhaka City Corporation’s problem; they are not obligated to clean the waste of illegal businesses. AL has done nothing to force the city organizations to implement the taskforce recommendations because the government itself is rife with corrupt officials from top to bottom, down to the last city official.
The horrific plight of the Buriganga is representative of the state of the rest of the waterways in Bangladesh. The 230 rivers large and small that crisscross the country are all endangered by pollution. A World Bank study said four major rivers near Dhaka — the Buriganga, Shitalakhya, Turag and Balu — receive 1.5 million cubic meters of waste water every day from 7,000 industrial units in surrounding areas and another 0.5 million cubic meters from other sources.
Despite Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s claim to be politically committed to saving the Buriganga, there has been abysmal progress in cleaning it up, with only 5% progress having been made in the last two years because the government has refused to allocate sufficient funding to revive it using dredging and other methods[1]. Out of a budget of Tk 944 crore, only Tk 100 crore has been released.
After five long years, the Awami League has held onto its power by force, forcing the results of a one-sided undemocratic election on the citizens against their will. They say that their reputation for working for the people speaks for itself. And yet in the past five years that this party has ruled, the country’s rivers have deteriorated at an alarming rate, another depressing symbol of the state of the country under AL rule.
