Taskforce helping grabbers!

A taskforce created to preserve rivers around the capital by properly demarcating their boundaries is in effect helping land-grabbers by apparently overlooking the setting up of pillars at wrong places. In the past three years since the demarcation work began in 2011, those rivers have lost some 2,500 acres of river land worth Tk. 250 billion to the land encroachers. Rather than taking steps to remove the wrongly placed pillars, the shipping minister, who heads the taskforce, has reportedly been pressing BIWTA to 'accept erroneous demarcations' and pay contractors involved in the work. When the defects are so glaring, why shouldn't those be corrected? This is bizarre as it is incomprehensible.   

How should one explain the entire chain of events taking place under the administration's watch that defies the very spirit of the 2009 High Court order to the government in response to which the prime minister formed the taskforce to retain the eroded parts as well as the shoals formed in those rivers. Distressingly, the very existence of the rivers supposed to be protected by the taskforce is in jeopardy.

Callousness is not the word to describe the gross irresponsibility on the part of those in charge of protecting the rivers as members of the taskforce. In truth, what they have done borders on the self-destructive.

A lot of damage has already been done to the rivers girdling Dhaka. The government must wake up and act to intervene from the highest level to save the lifelines of Dhaka.