City Desk :
Although the government planned to restore 10,000 kilometres of navigable waterways by excavating rivers and removing silt, only about 7,000 km of waterways have been made operational since 2010 to last year.
Out of this, 3,800 km were already operational.
That means only 3,200 km of abandoned waterways have been restored, according to multiple sources of Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority.
According to sources, under a master plan to excavate 53 inland waterways, the first phase targeted restoration of 10,000 kilometres of 24 waterways by 2025, reports UNB.
However, various organisations of vessel owners using inland waterways say that 7000 km of waterways have been activated on paper.
Many waterways are becoming abandoned due to lack of proper dredging and removal of silt.
Rights activists and experts say that owing to unplanned digging and removal of silt, navigability development is not getting the expected results.
According to the Ministry of Shipping, due to shortage of excavators and dredgers, river excavation and dredging work was disrupted earlier, but now there was no such crisis.
Around 38 new dredgers including auxiliary vessels have been added to BIWTA’s fleet in the last 14 years.
The number of dredgers in its fleet is now 45.
Besides, more than 50 dredgers of private companies have been involved in river excavation, said MoS sources.
On February 10, 2020, Khalid Mahmud Chowdhury, state minister for shipping, said in the Jatiyo Sangsad that a master plan for dredging had been taken up to protect navigability in waterways.
About 10,000 km of navigable waterways will be restored by re-dredging 178 rivers through BIWTA.
The state minister spoke about the same plan while inaugurating the Bhogai-Kangsa river excavation at Netrakona on May 25, 2019.
Earlier on October 17, 2017, after the inauguration of the capital dredging of the Bhairab-Katiadi waterway at Kaliprasad Union Parishad ground in Bhairab, Kishoreganj, the then Shipping Minister Shajahan Khan said that the government has taken the initiative of dredging 53 waterways at a cost of Tk 11,500 crore.
According to the sources concerned, a plan was taken in 2009 to restore 10,000 km of waterways by excavating 24 waterways and the project work started in 2010.
However, an account signed by additional chief engineer of BIWTA Dredging Department Sayedur Rahman shows that 800 km of waterways’ navigability has been developed in six years from 2010 to 2016 under the development and revenue fund.
