It does not help the image Dhaka city, the country's capital, when rain water submerges its roads and streets and remains there for days together until the sun dries those up. Many of its roads and streets are thus seen to be flooded with knee-deep rain water. There is yet no worthwhile effort to devise ways and means to drain such water out or make arrangements for its flow to the downstream rivers surrounding the capital. Pictures of passengers falling into muddy water with rickshaws or cars hitting potholes in major roads of the capital do fairly and objectively depict the unending miseries of over 14 million city-dwellers. Accessed worldwide through internet, these pictures give a negative message to the global public at a time when the country has just emerged as a lower middle-income country or it is getting the highest ever remittance flow from its overseas workers.
Last Saturday, this paper carried a report on the ground realities about the problem of water-logging in this capital city. It is a grim picture that many parts of the city go, more often than not, under water only after intermittent rains. This happened so, very recently, too. Similar distressing sights were focused by the press almost every year in the past. There are, however, fairly large organisations like City Corporations, the Rajdhani Unnayan Kartipakkha (RAJUK), the Water and Sewerage Authority (WASA), the Power Development Board (PDB) and the Titas Gas Transmission Ltd. But all such bodies do their work in a haphazard way or in an uncoordinated manner, ignoring what happens after a good road is dug in to install sewerage or power or gas lines. The WASA says it pays money to the DCCs to get the metalled roads, damaged by its linesmen, repaired. When the gas pipelines are installed underground by the Titas, it appears to be nobody's headache to repair the roads dug by it.
Even one of the two city mayors, while talking to the FE, has given an impression that he is powerless before the 'powerful' in making Dhaka city free from stagnation of rain water. Thus he seemed to have forgotten all the big promises he had made before the electorate on the eve of the city corporation election. As things stand today, it is only for the highest political leadership to intervene in salvaging the situation by putting a well-coordinated city governance system in place. It is time for the highest leadership to step in to form a unified body to give Dhaka the look it deserves as the capital of a country that is fast moving ahead with six plus GDP growth rate. Otherwise, the city bodies will, as usual, continue to be perennially and ritually blaming each other for the mess each of them creates. There is also no denying that not a single entity has the power to stem the rot.
Coordinated city governance needed
FE Team | Published: July 06, 2015 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2026 06:01:00
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