The poor must have the right to a small house

ON the World Habitat Day-2015 Dhaka wears the look of worst livable city and it happened not in one day but over the decades of land grabbing and illegal occupation of public land in the metropolis. News reports said speakers at a seminar on the occasion asked the government to work for low cost housing to provide a small home to every homeless. They said it is a universal right to all but in Bangladesh it appears none of the government business. They have also blamed the government for allowing powerful people to grab the city’s valuable open spaces such as parks, playgrounds, riverside, water bodies, city streets and pavement denying the city dwellers the much needed breathing space. As per city development plan, at least 25 percent of its total land needs to be open space but Dhaka with only 8.5 percent open spaces has already become a dumping place with narrow streets, poor sanitation and drainage and highly congested traffic making the city an unlivable place. Meanwhile politically influential quarters are taking hold of public land and developing high-rise buildings. There are many public institutions and laws but quite surprising illegal grabbing of public land such as city canals and playgrounds were carried out under successive governments and still taking place not out of the notice the concerned agencies. The city has already lost almost all big playgrounds where young people would play and elders take a walk. But many of them were turned commercial space overnight in less than a decade. Most canals were filled up to build shops and residential buildings when people responsible for their protection remained bystanders and there is no secret that they benefitted from it this way or that way. In fact the observance of World Habitat Day on first Monday of October since 1985 has just turned into a ritual in Bangladesh without any significance when our policy makers have altogether ignored its objectives to work for providing housing facility to all its citizens. Its ideal says the earth is for all and all must have a living place. But our government’s agencies such as RAJUK and Department of Housing are almost blindfolded about the need of the poor. They are allocating precious land and housing plots to themselves and ruling party men, bureaucrats and social elite where the low income people have no place. The government is rather evicting common people from their land in the city suburbs to develop new housing to distribute land among the urban rich. Landowners are made homeless with lump sum compensation without care about where they will go.  The government’s housing sector is riddled with unbridled corruption where powerful people are plundering the resources with least care to the fact that the homeless have also the right to a small shelter. We would say stop business with government’s plots and make housing a universal right to all.