Deal heavily with encroachers of water bodies

RESPONDING to a writ petition, the High Court recently asked the Deputy Commissioner, Superintendent of Police of Munshiganj, Upazila Nirbahi Officer of Srinagar and Director (enforcement) of Department of Environment to stop encroachment of Arial Beel.

The court ordered the authorities concerned to explain why their inaction should not be declared illegal.

It also asked them to issue show-cause notices to the encroachers.

The beel is a water body, and encroachment, earth-filling and construction work on this natural asset is a punishable offence as per the Natural Water Reservoir Conservation Act 2000 and Bangladesh Environment Conservation Act 1995.

When the policy of the capital’s decentralisation plan fails, everything gets concentrated in the capital Dhaka.

If a place becomes a centre of better treatment, research, education, it must be highly congested with a plethora of industries, offices, firms, processing centres, agricultural agency offices and even the offices of the GOs and NGOs which operate in the peripheries of the country.

More and more people will flock to Dhaka for jobs, services, certificates, treatment, education, research and everything.

For the huge number of people, the necessity of having a large number of apartment blocks, buildings will logically pop up.

In this process of concentration of everything in the capital, developers will be hell-bent to occupy more lands, fill waterbodies and encroach into Ecologically Critical Areas (ECA).

As successive governments grew apathetic to such environmental encroachment, water bodies are disappearing before our very eyes, resulting in water-clogging and other forms of civic problems. Mindless extraction of underground water without recharging the water table is taking place.

All this have contributed to making the once lush green and riverine city Dhaka one of the worst livable cities in the world.

The government must now control the damages done to the environment before it turns into a dangerous place for living.

In the wake of unfair withdrawal of water from common rivers by India in the upstream, salinity is intruding day by day in the coastal districts of Jashore, Khulna and Satkhira.

Thus the inhabitants of the coastal belt are ending up being ‘salinity migrants’.

On top of all, 7.1 million Bangladeshis turned into climate migrants in 2022 and the number could reach 13.3 million by 2050, warns the World Health Organisation.