Land grabbers and environment
Photo: Amdadul Haq / driknews
One of the local English dailies has recently published reports which lucidly depict how our public lands are being illegally occupied in different parts of the country by groups of unscrupulous land grabbers. This competition of gobbling up national assets has been a very common practice. Regardless of the environmental imbalance and other adverse effects, avaricious and unscrupulous land grabbers are stopping at nothing to satisfy their insatiable minds, even by burning forests and occupying riverbanks illegally, or denuding the hills that cause landslides claiming lots of lives every year. A country should have at least 25% its total landmass under forest, whereas our country has only 9%. Yet unscrupulous people are burning forests and cutting down excessive trees on a large scale. Besides these, during rainy season the city is water-logged owing to illegal occupation of riverbanks. Undoubtedly, they are care very little about environment balancing factors like trees, rivers, hills, fertile cultivable lands and so on. A report reveals secret of burning some parts of Sundarbans. Local people have said that very often a group of people set fire to trees to create some empty lands in order to use them for person benefits. And these illegal activities are being done with the knowledge of the authorities concerned who seem to be weak and lenient. The continued illegal activities prove it very well. Such reports just keep coming in the media. Most of the criminals are going unpunished. It is high time the authorities concerned intervened in order to protect our country from severe environmental degradation.
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