Mindless filling of wetlands beside Dhaka City is unacceptable

Nobody seems to bother about Dhaka’s perennial problem of water logging. If the water retention capacity of water bodies is continuously filled up, where will the accumulated rainwater of Dhaka City go? The city’s drainage system is not smart; its roads are poorly constructed with little plan in mind about the utmost necessity of water drainage. Added to this are the narrowing of canals and filling of water bodies located outside the city.
As a result, the water logging problem of Dhaka City has increased instead of decreasing. Against this backdrop, the news that Bangladesh Agricultural Development Corporation (BADC) has filled 11 acres of 53-acre water retention area of Goidartek in the capital’s Gabtoli for a four-story building meant for a tissue culture laboratory is just terrible.
Moreover, it has been reported in the media that the DNCC, Rajuk as well as the Department of Environment (DoE), the authorities responsible for looking after the land, did not take any action in this regard even though the land filling continued for over six months until March. Negligence apart, why must everything in the country be Dhaka centric? Can’t the BADC build its tissue culture laboratory outside Dhaka? Preserving the water retention capacity of the water bodies on the outskirts of Dhaka City is vitally important.
Even remembering the need of Dhaka’s centralisation, the laboratory could be built elsewhere. This is how one after another Dhaka’s unplanned development is taking place that can create monumental problems for the city in the coming years.
The monsoon season is coming and here is an example of carelessness of the relevant authorities on the need of Dhaka’s water drainage. This filling up of the water body at Gabtoli must be stopped. There is no room to ignore this environmental suicide. Environmentalists have rightly pointed out that filling up a water body can seriously affect biodiversity.
Since, environmentalists believe that the BADC violated the Environment Conservation (amendment) Act-2010 the organisation can be punished for filling the 11-acre area marked as water retention land in the Detailed Area Plan (DAP) of Rajuk.