Tapping surface water source

It is good to know that the government has, at long last, signed a $250 million loan agreement with Asian Development Bank (ADP) to tap surface water for Dhaka city. The deal, signed last week for the implementation of sustainable water supply project, will cost about $675 million. The Dhaka Water Supply and Sewerage Authority (WASA), the implementing agency of the project, aims to reduce dependence on groundwater to about 30% of the total water supply by 2021.
The WASA now depends 78% on groundwater out of its total supply for Dhaka city. According to Dhaka WASA, the concessional financial assistance will help expand water supply and improve its quality. The treatment plant, press report says, will draw water from the Meghna river, about 22 kilometres east of Dhaka city. The proposed treatment plant will be able to treat 500 million litres of water daily. In the process, the extraction of groundwater is expected to be reduced by 150 million litres per day allowing the authority to augment its overall surface water supply to 1.9 billion litres a day by 2021.
Kazuhiko Higuchi, country director of ADB who signed the loan agreement on behalf of the organization on April 24 last, observed that Dhaka needs more water for its increasing population and this financial assistance will help the city water authority bring about improvement in water supply. Tapping the new water source, in turn, will go a long way in conserving vital groundwater, Higuchi observed. Moreover the ADB-aided sustainable water supply project envisages setting up of community-based organizations in order to help poor people get water supply through legal connections at reasonable cost.  
Despite measures so far taken by the Dhaka WASA, the water crisis persists in a large number of city areas. During the on-going summer season, the residents in different parts of the city have been passing sleepless nights for collecting a bucketful of water for each family. The WASA authority blames falling ground water level and technical problems in some pumps for shortage of water supply. In some areas, press reports say, the situation is so acute that the residents have to wait round the clock for water supply. In some parts, water supply remains suspended for days. The WASA authority had assured the consumers time and again that there would be no shortage of water as the production was higher than the daily demand.
We would like to mention that the Dhaka WASA faces a serious problem with regard to tap surface water for the city dwellers. Experts say the water crisis persisting since the emergence of Bangladesh shall continue for an indefinite period until surface water available from the river is tapped and treated. The tubewell network maintained by WASA is a temporary measure. It is surprising as to why we failed to solve water crisis permanently under a comprehensive plan during the last four decades of our independence. We have reasons to believe that no government during this long period took such a vital matter seriously and devised ways and means for a permanent solution to this basic public need. It remains a matter of speculation how long the ever increasing number of citizens will have to wait to see pure water flowing from their taps.
As the population in Dhaka city has been increasing with each passing day and the sources of surface water are heavily polluted, the inhabitants are forced to depend on ground water drawn by deep tube wells. At present, the WASA maintains a vast network of deep tube wells in the city. According to official estimate, 87% of city's water requirement is now met by extracting ground water.  Such massive extraction of ground water has caused steady fall in water table in the city at a rate of three meters annually.
Government efforts to make rivers around the capital -- the Buriganga, the Shitalakhya, the Turag and the Balu -- free from pollution have yielded no result. The water, drawn from the river Buriganga and treated at Dhaka Water Works in Chandni Ghat, is unfit for human consumption. But a large section of population in old parts of Dhaka city still depends on supply from Dhaka Water Works. In this column we had mentioned that the way the rivers are being polluted fast by industrial and municipal wastes, it will be difficult to get supply of fresh water for the city population from the underground reserve alone in future.
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