We have bitter experience with mega projects so World Bank must ensure proper use of its loan

The government has started having talks with the World Bank regarding a mega project for restoring Dhaka’s five polluted rivers — Buriganga, Shitalakhya, Balu, Turag and Dhalwshwari. According to a report of a national daily on Tuesday, the project will need a fund of $20 billion of which the World Bank will be the lead financier. It is providing technical assistance to develop an umbrella investment programme (UIP) design for the restoration of these rivers.

There is no doubt that it is extremely important to bring back these rivers as well as canals to their natural state for healthy living in the capital, but we do not think this government is fit to take any project however important they may be because of its record of massive corruption and trampling of people’s rights. Instead, the government is well advised to find out the causes that have led these rivers to their present unnatural state and address those without taking up funds from outside sources.

There are three major reasons for which these rivers have become not only narrower and their beds shallower but their waters have also got extremely polluted where aquatic lives including fish have now become impossible. In fact, if these reasons that have destroyed these rivers cannot be addressed, however much money is spent, the condition of these rivers will not improve. They will remain as they are, or will deteriorate even more.

Firstly, the encroached portion of these rivers must be recovered from the encroachers who are, more often than not, political people who care little about the welfare of the state but their own, albeit unethically.

Secondly, free flow of untreated industrial effluent into these rivers has to be stopped. The orders the court made time and again must be followed to stop encroachment and pollution.
Thirdly, people in general have to be made generally aware about the fact that these rivers, in fact all rivers of the country, are among the country’s most valuable assets and they have a duty not to pollute these rivers by throwing unwanted objects into the rivers.

If these three obligations are carried out, we hope rivers will gradually get back their naturalness. As far as the fund is concerned, it will be necessary only in the dredging work for increasing the navigability of these rivers.

Corruption and plundering of money from state banks followed by capital flight from the country to different destinations have brought the country’s economy to its knees. When the government is grappling to survive, leaving the economy in its present messy state inevitably inching towards being declared ‘bankrupt’, taking up any mega project for mega corruption is totally unacceptable.