Evidently, river erosion has so far failed to draw the policymakers' attention it deserves. The water resources minister, however, did a good job when he disclosed at a recent international conference in Dhaka that no fewer than 50,000 people of the country are made landless annually because of river erosion. It is indeed a wake-up call on a grave situation involving loss of precious lands. He expressed his helplessness in taking care of the victims of river erosion as he admitted that it was practically impossible to rehabilitate them. Without going into details, he pointed to 'some mega projects' implemented at a cost of Taka 1.7 billion to protect the banks of the Jamuna River. But all other rivers have their due share of erosion. The two-day international conference on water and flood management was organised by the Institute of Water and Flood Management Institute (IWFM) of the Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology (BUET).
Catastrophic damage by erosion has already been caused to the country's scarce land resources. According to the Bangladesh Water Development Board (BWDB), it loses 6,000 hectares of land due to erosion annually. There is, however, no exact number of people affected by it. But erosion has largely been responsible for the marginalisation of a large number of its population. It has displaced people and adversely affected their social and economic circumstances, triggering a flow of migration and increasing urban poverty as its fall-outs. Although a number of policies and laws have been formulated with the aim of mitigating the needs of the marginalised people, the country is still far from developing appropriate guidelines for addressing the causes and consequences of river-bank erosion.
Sadly, the affected people do not have access to institutional support and are not included in any rehabilitation programme while the main issue continues to be overlooked. When they are displaced from their birth places, they become disconnected from their sources of income, lands, food production and other livelihood options. All these force them to engage in new livelihood activities. Education of their children is also disrupted and they are deprived of safe water, sanitation and other basic needs. Indeed,erosion is affecting about 150 upazilas of 50 out of 64 districts of the country. It is not really understandable why no serious attempts have yet been made to reduce river erosion through river training and partial taming through research. Experts have identified sedimentation responsible for eroding river banks.
Conservation and utilisation of river resources should have been the most important development issue, but in 90 per cent of cases, construction of structures like buildings and roads is considered to be development. It is worth investing in river-bank protection, flood control programmes and dredging, as they bear immense importance for people's lives and livelihoods. Navigability of nearly 7,500 km of waterways has been lost over the last four decades. Now it should present policymakers with a big headache since internal waterways constitute a major trade route and loss of navigation over such long stretches is hardly acceptable. Because rivers can no more hold water, such loss of navigability causes massive erosion of their banks. Regular dredging thus brooks no delay.
Tackling river erosion on a priority basis
FE Team | Published: March 11, 2015 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2026 06:01:00
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