Reopening the Shela route for commercial vessels

The government reopened the Shela route on last Wednesday after 26 days of spill of 0.36 million litres of furnace oil that spread across the entire length of the river and into the sea. A local daily said that at least 400 water vessels carrying furnace oil, cement, crops, stone, and other bio-hazardous materials plied the river to reach Mongla port that could spell worst catastrophe anytime. The oil spill that occurred on December 09, 2014, compelled the government to suspend plying vessels through the Shela river as the spill affected the biodiversity and the ecosystem of the world's largest mangrove forest worth of Tk. 1.0 billion. The decision of reopening Shela route for commercial vessels was taken in defiance of the laws of wildlife conservation, environment protection, Unesco's World Heritage Commission and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.
The government had allowed vessels' movement through the Sundarbans on April 2011 as the Mongla-Ghasiakhali channel lost its navigability due to heavy silting. The Shipping Minister recently said that the government has started dredging the 31-km channel and six kilometres have been dredged so far. The river route is also under the Bangladesh-India goods carrying protocol causing increase in number of vessels since 2012 when the protocol was revived. However, the news that only 7.0 per cent of the dredging work has been completed is not an encouraging one. To add salt to injury, the Shipping Minister recently said, the ministry was not considering a permanent ban on plying of commercial vessels through the Shela river.
Meanwhile, the United Nations team that visited the affected areas to assess the impact of the oil slick and advise the government on how to reduce risks of a similar disaster, strongly recommended restriction on plying of lighter vessels through the Shela river. To allow commercial vessels' movement through the river will only allow the real cause of the havoc to continue unabated. The reopening of the Shela route for commercial traffic will bring, as feared, man-made catastrophe for the sanctified nature. Actually, declaring the Shela river off limits to commercial vessels will in no way put the users of this route out of business altogether, it will only increase their cost of business slightly due to the detour the cargo carriers will have to make to reach their destinations and that too until the silted Mongla-Ghasiakhali channel is reopened after its dredging is completed.
The shipping ministry and the business community are conveniently using the argument of economy and trade to justify their continued abuse of the waterway. But in doing so they are missing the bigger perspective, the longer-term national interest of preserving Sundarbans' delicate ecological balance. This is the worst kind of myopia.
Abdullah Zobair
azobair@gmail.com