Bangladeshis should earnestly pray
Saturday, 18 August 2007
Qazi Azad
SHOCK therapy is also a recognised mode of healing in some cases. The patriotic Bangladeshis should earnestly pray that the receding flood, which has caused massive devastations to standing crops and hearths and homes of the affected millions across more than half of the country, including their thin hopes, should leave behind an enduring lesson for this nation and its government.
This flood has revived a dying debate on the role of the haphazardly constructed rural roads in prolonging stagnation of floodwaters in many of the affected areas. Dr Mohammad Ali Bhuiyan, a professor in the Water Resource Department of the BUET, has revived the old debate. He blames the persistent lack of planning and coordination at the government level for much of the repeated damages by recurrent floods.
He says, "Since the floods of the late 1980s many studies have been carried out and the findings of those research initiatives were mixed. They did not fully back embankments and there was a mini-slogan "Live with floods". What came out of it all were strategic embankments. And for the first time drainage was brought to limelight and was to play a major role in saving many areas from floods."
The professor has categorically told an interviewer from a local daily the other day: "The road network around Bangladesh has also a lot to blame for our flooding problems. In the last few decades the road network has increased hugely around Bangladesh, but the government has gone about building roads without any planning, study and research. The result is that there is little or no drainage around for the roads built around the country. Water, which could have drained out in few days, now lasts for weeks".
If long stagnation of recurrent floods in this low-lying country, sharing many rivers with neighbouring upper riparian countries, continues to inflict huge economic losses frequently and we all remain passive about it, then we have learnt no lesson from the famous arithmetical problem about the monkey trying to climb an oily bamboo pole. While progressing three steps forward and then two steps downward along the economic scale due to repetitive damages by recurrent floods, this country may never reach the lofty goal of being a developed one. Should we forever live in the twilight?
When roads are many and they intersect one another perpendicularly or at some angle they form the banks of many future immensely big tanks, each spread over a vast track of land, that would be filled up with water and hold it for quite long in the event of flood. Such roads in an enormous number have come up in the recent years under the political patronage or at the behest of corrupt politics or politics without constructive imagination.
The union parishad members and chairmen, the upazila project officers and, in some cases, previously elected members of parliament are to blame, and in a few instances credited, for raising numerous roads all across the country under the pretext of connectivity being essential for harnessing local economic potentials and triggering growth. It is obviously a sound argument in a favourable situation. But in this land-scarce country with a very high population density, where most people have a propensity to build separate homes of their own -- each with one house and a pond in the front side for guests and another house and a pond at the rear for family members -- political patronisation, apparently for purpose of votes, in having a connecting road constructed for every new home and every new hamlet in the middle of an agricultural field reinforces the unending invasion of the housing sector on the shrinking farmlands.
Focusing on this point, this scribe pleaded in an article in this paper early last year for organised housing in the rural areas under a strict official policy. It was suggested that the policy should require every prospective builder of a new home to obtain prior permission for doing so from a designated higher authority. It was argued that concentration of houses in one area of each village should be encouraged to avoid the need for raising unnecessary new rural roads.
A respectable minister of that time casually mentioned about this proposal in course of an informal discussion with a select group, in which this scribe was also present. He stated that Kuwait had tried a similar housing arrangement, but it could not entice the dwellers to settle therein on a permanent basis. They all fled away in whatever direction they had chosen.
Actually, it was in Libya where such a project failed. Muammar Gaddafi built the project during his youthful eccentric days as the head of state of his country. He collected roaming nomads from his desert country to settle therein. Habits, strengthened by genetic codes, hardly die or never die. They fled away and went back to the desert to move around, as Rabindranath Tagore imagined, "riding on running horses, igniting fire beneath their hearts, and driving sands up in the sky to fly with the wind".
Muammar Gaddafi -- the mercurial man, now mellowed greatly by age or many disheartening experiences, was accustomed to trying impossible things. On completing his coup at the late hours of night on September 1, 1969, he had the French Ambassador at Tripoli awakened from deep sleep and called the envoy in to tell him about Napoleon. It is either the Newsweek or the Time magazine that joked about it in an article, published sometime in early 1970s. It could be that Gaddafi in 1969 had Napoleonic ambition. But during that fiery time of the twentieth century the Americans were bleeding in Vietnam, Cuba's Castro was breathing fire, from across the sea, directed towards the United States and the Bangladeshis, yet under Pakistan, were loudly singing in chorus, "Mr. Justice, those who will try you, these people, have risen today."
The Libyan leader's project for his country's perennially unsettled nomads was doomed by nature to fail. But Bangladeshis are no nomads. They have lived under permanent structures throughout known history. They can be organized, with steady motivation and under legal influence, to live and build houses in designated areas of their villages to form clusters, which would be accessible by existing roads and without new roads.
The problem of unplanned new and numerous roads creating obstruction to water flows during floods drew attention while the devastating floods of 1988 and 1989 were not receding as fast as expected. The subsequent good time obliterated the memories of the bad time in us. But a nation, which forgets its tasks with the changes of seasons, will forever find itself caught up in a vicious cycle of prosperity and adversities unless it dares to act decisively to break it at some point.
The government may formulate a policy on rural housing and new road construction as part of a firm move to reduce the adverse effects of future floods and save our agricultural lands. We all should remember that drawing constructive lessons from bad experiences are a sign of wisdom in both individuals and nations.
SHOCK therapy is also a recognised mode of healing in some cases. The patriotic Bangladeshis should earnestly pray that the receding flood, which has caused massive devastations to standing crops and hearths and homes of the affected millions across more than half of the country, including their thin hopes, should leave behind an enduring lesson for this nation and its government.
This flood has revived a dying debate on the role of the haphazardly constructed rural roads in prolonging stagnation of floodwaters in many of the affected areas. Dr Mohammad Ali Bhuiyan, a professor in the Water Resource Department of the BUET, has revived the old debate. He blames the persistent lack of planning and coordination at the government level for much of the repeated damages by recurrent floods.
He says, "Since the floods of the late 1980s many studies have been carried out and the findings of those research initiatives were mixed. They did not fully back embankments and there was a mini-slogan "Live with floods". What came out of it all were strategic embankments. And for the first time drainage was brought to limelight and was to play a major role in saving many areas from floods."
The professor has categorically told an interviewer from a local daily the other day: "The road network around Bangladesh has also a lot to blame for our flooding problems. In the last few decades the road network has increased hugely around Bangladesh, but the government has gone about building roads without any planning, study and research. The result is that there is little or no drainage around for the roads built around the country. Water, which could have drained out in few days, now lasts for weeks".
If long stagnation of recurrent floods in this low-lying country, sharing many rivers with neighbouring upper riparian countries, continues to inflict huge economic losses frequently and we all remain passive about it, then we have learnt no lesson from the famous arithmetical problem about the monkey trying to climb an oily bamboo pole. While progressing three steps forward and then two steps downward along the economic scale due to repetitive damages by recurrent floods, this country may never reach the lofty goal of being a developed one. Should we forever live in the twilight?
When roads are many and they intersect one another perpendicularly or at some angle they form the banks of many future immensely big tanks, each spread over a vast track of land, that would be filled up with water and hold it for quite long in the event of flood. Such roads in an enormous number have come up in the recent years under the political patronage or at the behest of corrupt politics or politics without constructive imagination.
The union parishad members and chairmen, the upazila project officers and, in some cases, previously elected members of parliament are to blame, and in a few instances credited, for raising numerous roads all across the country under the pretext of connectivity being essential for harnessing local economic potentials and triggering growth. It is obviously a sound argument in a favourable situation. But in this land-scarce country with a very high population density, where most people have a propensity to build separate homes of their own -- each with one house and a pond in the front side for guests and another house and a pond at the rear for family members -- political patronisation, apparently for purpose of votes, in having a connecting road constructed for every new home and every new hamlet in the middle of an agricultural field reinforces the unending invasion of the housing sector on the shrinking farmlands.
Focusing on this point, this scribe pleaded in an article in this paper early last year for organised housing in the rural areas under a strict official policy. It was suggested that the policy should require every prospective builder of a new home to obtain prior permission for doing so from a designated higher authority. It was argued that concentration of houses in one area of each village should be encouraged to avoid the need for raising unnecessary new rural roads.
A respectable minister of that time casually mentioned about this proposal in course of an informal discussion with a select group, in which this scribe was also present. He stated that Kuwait had tried a similar housing arrangement, but it could not entice the dwellers to settle therein on a permanent basis. They all fled away in whatever direction they had chosen.
Actually, it was in Libya where such a project failed. Muammar Gaddafi built the project during his youthful eccentric days as the head of state of his country. He collected roaming nomads from his desert country to settle therein. Habits, strengthened by genetic codes, hardly die or never die. They fled away and went back to the desert to move around, as Rabindranath Tagore imagined, "riding on running horses, igniting fire beneath their hearts, and driving sands up in the sky to fly with the wind".
Muammar Gaddafi -- the mercurial man, now mellowed greatly by age or many disheartening experiences, was accustomed to trying impossible things. On completing his coup at the late hours of night on September 1, 1969, he had the French Ambassador at Tripoli awakened from deep sleep and called the envoy in to tell him about Napoleon. It is either the Newsweek or the Time magazine that joked about it in an article, published sometime in early 1970s. It could be that Gaddafi in 1969 had Napoleonic ambition. But during that fiery time of the twentieth century the Americans were bleeding in Vietnam, Cuba's Castro was breathing fire, from across the sea, directed towards the United States and the Bangladeshis, yet under Pakistan, were loudly singing in chorus, "Mr. Justice, those who will try you, these people, have risen today."
The Libyan leader's project for his country's perennially unsettled nomads was doomed by nature to fail. But Bangladeshis are no nomads. They have lived under permanent structures throughout known history. They can be organized, with steady motivation and under legal influence, to live and build houses in designated areas of their villages to form clusters, which would be accessible by existing roads and without new roads.
The problem of unplanned new and numerous roads creating obstruction to water flows during floods drew attention while the devastating floods of 1988 and 1989 were not receding as fast as expected. The subsequent good time obliterated the memories of the bad time in us. But a nation, which forgets its tasks with the changes of seasons, will forever find itself caught up in a vicious cycle of prosperity and adversities unless it dares to act decisively to break it at some point.
The government may formulate a policy on rural housing and new road construction as part of a firm move to reduce the adverse effects of future floods and save our agricultural lands. We all should remember that drawing constructive lessons from bad experiences are a sign of wisdom in both individuals and nations.