Editorial
Buriganga cleanup
Major concerns need to be addressed
We understand that the second phase of the plan to clean up the Buriganga will be launched sometime next month. We take it that the first phase of the cleanup, which commenced early January this year, has been completed.
Cleaning up of the Buriganga has been a long felt need. In fact when we call for saving the Buriganga the underlying message is the compulsion to save the capital, because without saving the Buriganga it is well nigh impossible to save Dhaka. And Dhaka may go the way many habitations have gone in the past with the demise of the river on which they were established, survived and flourished.
But cleaning up the Buriganga is but one small element of the larger effort to save the Buriganga. And while one talks about saving Dhaka by cleaning up this river one must not fail to take into consideration the other three rivers, the Dhaleshawri, Turag and Sitalakhya, that also serve the capital and may soon fall in a moribund state if actions are not taken to resuscitate them.
Before the second phase is launched it would be nice to know the lessons of Phase - I. If the target in the first phase was to remove 3000 tons of solid waste within a particular stretch of the river within a specified time, we wonder whether that has been achieved in full.
There is the problem of different type of solid wastes that have been, and will be, excavated from the river bed which need different areas for dumping and some of these wastes are not bio-degradable while some can be recycled. The cleanup also requires preventing further dumping of garbage, and our understanding is that dumping is going on everywhere along the banks. There is need to prevent commercial effluence, that happens to be the largest single cause of contamination of the river water, from being disgorged into the Buriganga, apart from the large amount of liquid waste that comes from domestic sources. Unless these steps are taken, the clean up drive may not deliver the expected benefits.
The clean up drive also requires policy interventions that among other things deal with issues like demarcating the shoreline to define the river, managing the river banks, levying taxes on polluters to pay for the cleaning, and a continuous oversight mechanism.
A project such as this is indeed a huge undertaking and that is where we feel is the need for a comprehensive long-term plan that will address among other things the issues mentioned above. There is a whole raft of concerns that must be addressed in the plan, which involves both policy and technical interventions. Also the scheme is a continuous process and requires taking the people along to make the plan successful.
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