Are rivers being killed slowly but surely?

The nexus of power-abusing people -- district administration, politicians, private resource-grabbers -- are reportedly out to reduce the key rivers of Dhaka into 'large size drains' by willfully misreading a High Court judgement to demarcate the river areas. According to a contemporary, the district administration has already started laying pillars to mark the river boundaries, but has chosen the lean-season edge, excluding the 'foreshores' which rightly belong to the rivers. This is going on allegedly with the blessings of a minister. A total of 1,555 acres fall within the foreshores along the 110 kilometre stretch of the Buriganga, Turag, Balu and Shitalakhya, and the BIWTA pays the district administration an annual fee for it. The ulterior motive is to permanently settle the assorted encroachers' claims, to their benefit alone, regardless of what it means to the ecology of the rivers. This must be remedied before it is too late. The need is not to shrink the rivers in the pretext of keeping out encroachers, but to deepen and salvage the sources for honest and healthful activities that benefit the public, not unscrupulous coteries. The city's growing demand for safe and sustainable water supplies could be fairly met if a massive cleanup project were undertaken, and sustained community participation mobilized, so that the surface waters could be managed in environmentally sound ways for generations to come. Some water sources are on the way to becoming virtually sewers and cesspools and need immediate and effective attention. Another urgent reason for salvaging the rivers and other water bodies is the undeniable fact that continued over-exploitation of underground sources through deep tubewells has been depleting the natural acquifers to such an extent that the water level in them has been sinking by as much as three metres annually. Severely depleted acquifers cannot be easily replenished even after good rainfalls and this eventually leads to aridity, crop failures and land subsidence. In a monsoon-fed land, surface water protection and treatment would make far better sense than the overuse of deep tubewells. Unfortunately good sense does not always prevail.The natural and built environment of Bangladesh are both at the mercy of ignorant and greedy 'developers' and their friends in power.The stinking and choking surface water sources in the much-pampered industrial areas are proof enough. Such pollution should be treated as criminal negligence of the highest order and stern action taken immediatly to reverse this suicidal trend. Bangladesh is blessed with some 200 rivers, rivulets and streams, big and small, enriching their paths with plenty of haors, baors, beels and jheels. This well-endowed land could have been ecologically one of the world's richest and most sustainable if it had wiser and ecologically educated policy-makers and governments -- in the past and present --- devoted to 'real' development. One hopes this time round, the much talked-about plan to tap surface water would be taken to fruition -- for the greater good -- for that would understandably necessitate a massive clean-up of the polluted water sources as well as re-excavation of 'lost' ones.