Karwan Bazar kitchen market must be relocated before it’s too late

The Karwan Bazar kitchen market, which is largely responsible for traffic woes in the capital Dhaka for a long time, has turned into a hot potato of metropolitan politics.

The kitchen market that has 1789 permanent and 180 temporary shops sprawling on 24 bighas of land in Karwan Bazar, is touted to be a teething problem for its owner Dhaka North City Corporation.

According to a recent daily report, the rehabilitation of the wholesalers and retailers, who are very small in number, has turned into a conundrum for the city corporation, local ward commissioners, local ruling party activists and representatives of the business community of Karwan Bazar.

If you are an inhabitant of Dhaka city, you must have lots of firsthand experience of the plethora of its problems.

Once you chart the woes of the capital, you will come across problems, be it water pollution, waste disposal system, air pollution, inadequate and conventional drainage with low capacity, unsafe food, to name a few of the chronic problems.

An ideal city should have attractive parks, spacious and well-planned roads, efficient transportation system, and enough public spaces; but Dhaka city lacks in all these things depressingly.

The Global Liveability Index 2022, prepared by the Economist Intelligence Unit, recently ranked Dhaka as 7th least livable city in the world, scrutinising stability, healthcare, education, culture, environment and infrastructure.

The current government, which boasts particularly about the infrastructural boom in the last decade, couldn’t push the index substantially up.

It is still in the bottom rung.

We call upon the authorities to resolve the riddle of Karwan Bazar relocation so that the process of decongestion of Dhaka can be started.

To make the city livable, the authorities should immediately start decentralisation before it becomes an abandoned city.

It is worth mentioning that the underground water table of Dhaka is going down despite the city being crisscrossed by rivers and canals in the good old days.