Death of a lifeline

Thus die the rivers. Trimohoni, off the river Balu, on the eastern fringe of the capital bears the unbearable testimony of pollution originating mainly from Dhaka Wasa's sewerage system that dumps untreated wastes in the network of canals connected to the river. PHOTO: SK Enamul Haq Inam Ahmed and Morshed Ali Khan

The kingfisher was sitting lonely in the gathering dusk on a dead branch sticking out of tar black water. Our handkerchiefs were proving too inadequate to keep the stench out of our nostrils. With each stroke of the oar, a thick liquid similar to burnt lube oil splashed up. The sound of the oar was blunt and heavy, like hitting mud with a stick.

We were surprised at the kingfisher -- the first sighting of any bird that depends on water for survival. It means there must be fish too in this muck that we still call a river -- Buriganga. Our hope evaporated soon as the kingfisher dived and picked up an insect, looking like the ones you find in your septic tank. When fish is gone, sewage insects are the only feed.

For the last three hours we have been sailing through a river that resembles nothing but pure muck. From Bosila Ghat near the under-construction Third Buriganga Bridge up to as far as you may go towards Munshiganj, the river is just a flowing black sheet of sewage. The stench only increased when the propeller of passing barges whipped up the 'water'. The Buriganga river today is the most stunning monument to an environmental disaster where no vertebrate life form survives. It is a river without fish and water.

One of the main sources of this highly toxic sludge is just on the other side of the river at Hazaribagh of the capital. From there, nearly 250 large leather industries and several hundred small ones have been dumping untreated chemical-mixed water into the river. Every day they pump a staggering 22,000 cubic metres of poison into the Buriganga. According to a World Health Organization (WHO) bulletin, every day these units also dump ten tons of solid waste into the river. Efforts to relocate them to a modern zone in Savar, equipped with effluent treatment plants (ETP), has not worked out in years, as neither the industry owners nor the government want to pay for the relocation cost. Nobody has ever calculated how much these industries contribute to the economy, and how much they destroy.

Polluters vs fishermen
Experts believe Hazaribagh tanneries alone inflict the most severe blow to the air, land, and water in the city. The air within a ten-kilometre radius of the Hazaribagh tanneries is so foul and toxic that thousands of people suffer from various respiratory and skin diseases. Residents in Hazaribagh, Lalbagh, Azimpur, Rayer Bazar, Dhanmondi, and Beri Bandh areas complain of 'corrosion' in their tin roofs and other metal household objects. Housewives even complain of having their ornaments corroded due to the toxicity in the air.

While our industries proudly boast of foreign exchange earnings, no matter how much pollution they are causing by refusing to install ETPs, thousands of traditional fishermen who have been tossed out of the rivers and canals, think if the rivers and canals around the city were clean, they could also bring in a huge amount of foreign currencies, producing and exporting good quality fishes.

Lakhan Rajbangshi from Zaillapara, Basila where a fishermen community of 50 families have lived for over 100 years, said the Buriganga alone could produce enough fish to feed the city population.

"We are spending crores of taka in foreign currencies to import fish from Myanmar, India, and Thailand, but I can assure you, if you return us our river with flow of good quality water we would start exporting river produce within a year," Lakhan, who is now unemployed and miserable, said.

Three days before, we had gone to the Shitalakkhya river near Kanchpur Bridge and saw the unbelievable sight of a swath of 'strawberry shake' tone of purple dye pouring into the river through a drain pipe, frothing and spreading across the river, poisoning everything as it worked through.

At Demra, we again oared through a filthy liquid that is the Shitalakkhya. A small channel that comes parallel to the main river was disgorging effluent at full speed from nearby industries. The refuse then mix with the Shitalakkhya water and ripple down in bubbles poisoning fishes to death, and seeping into the underground aquifer, polluting that as well.

A more horrifying story emerges about the possible contamination of the city's groundwater, as a study jointly done by the World Bank and the Institute of Water Modelling (IWM) warns that the groundwater, on which over 80 percent of the city's population depend, is fast getting contaminated. The contamination mainly occurs at river beds, and at industrial effluent dumping points from where aquifers get recharged. While the Hazaribagh groundwater is classified as the most affected, with time the groundwater pollution is creeping towards other parts of the city too.

Sorry tale of Trimohoni
Residents of Nandigram near the eastern fringe of the city should have been the luckiest people on earth because three rivers -- the Narai, Devdholai, and the Balu -- meet there to form the Trimohoni and pass through the village. Instead local residents consider themselves cursed and doomed. Millions of cubic metres of sewage, and industrial and household wastes generated in the capital's Tejgaon, Dhanmondi, Gulshan, Rajabazar, Maghbazar, Motijheel, Bashabo, and many other densely populated areas fall into the Trimohoni. We, living in plush apartments in the capital, are the source of their misery, as each time we flush our toilets the Trimohoni residents receive it in their rivers through Dhaka Water and Sewerage Authority's (Wasa) outlets at Rampura and Motijheel through Begunbari canal. The Nandigram people are now surrounded by rivers of excreta, where the rivers flow with everything but water.

In Trimohoni area we stood at the doorway of a hut in the smelly village watching a sick child curled up in a bed. Her breaths were shallow. For two days, she had been having a bout of diarrhoea. Her mother had repeatedly warned her not to go near the poisoned river. Still she had taken a dip in the river in a forgetful moment. And now she was in a terrible state.

Pitch black effluents from Tejgaon Industrial Area containing heavy metals such as lead, cadmium, and magnesium are causing serious pollution in Begunbari and Narai canals, leading to pollution of the Balu river. Interestingly, the same river is one of the major sources of water for Saidabad Water Treatment Plant for Dhaka city in the downstream, where it joins the Shitalakkhya. Experts already warned that the river water around the metropolis is so contaminated that it is 'beyond treatment'. Our lack of foresight in planning is well established in the setting up of the water treatment plant at Saidabad before thinking about installing ETPs in our highly polluting industrial units. There is no data to indicate contamination of the supplied water, but frequent outbreaks of waterborne diseases surely suggest an alarming level of contamination in our tap water.

Turag, Buriganga, Shitalakkhya
The Turag river is another bead in the string of the dying rivers that surround the capital. Only a trickle of black liquid represents the river that serves as the lifeline of the southern fringe of the capital. Not only pollution, currently there are more earth filling projects in the Turag than in any other river of the city.

The existence of all these rivers has been pushed to a further edge by a free-for-all encroachment galore. We sailed for miles up and down the four rivers and saw the chilling evidence of how criminals and renowned business enterprises are taking their claims in the rivers at will. And there is no one to stop them; no vigil to identify them.

As we sailed through the Buriganga, we spotted a vast swath of the river fenced off with bamboo poles near Kholamora. Dredgers were moored there that roared sand-filled water inside the fenced area. The river was being filled up, slowly. Already about 500 feet of the river has been turned into land where stands a concrete structure. Another 500 feet or so are in the process of being filled. We stood there and searched for the original river boundary, and finally located the embankment about half a kilometre away that once marked the beginning of the river. That half a kilometre is already gone to meet the appetite of the encroachers. Another half a mile will be gone, in who knows how many months, or days.

A few hundred yards down, we found a few hundred acres of land jutting out into the river in the name of 'Titanic Housing', the same crook is filling up more sections of the river with earth and nobody to stop it. A building is standing right in the middle of the river. Fresh signs of earth-filling of the river are everywhere. It is an awe-striking sight. How effortlessly they are gobbling up the river, making it slimmer and slimmer until nothing will be left.

The same is the case along the Turag and Shitalakkhya. Universities and housing projects have sprung up in the rivers. Sand traders have expanded into the waters, fencing off their own stakes. Industries have found land. It is an unfettered bonanza of river grabbing. You grab it and cook up some documents. Pay tax for the land, which once was part of a river, by some strange manipulation of the system. And it is all yours on the cheap.

Dry canals
The story does not stop here. Just when you think things cannot get any worse, they do. We found canal after canal that either fed into the river systems of Dhaka or fed from them, are choked and dead now. It is mayhem of an unprecedented scale. Even whole river systems have been rendered dry.

Standing on 'a private road' to a brick kiln at Waaspur we witnessed what havoc could be wreaked by a single person. The brick kiln owner built the road chocking the passage for one of the most widely used canals, Atir Khal. As far as the eyes can see, the canal is just a dry gulch. For over 50 years, Atir Khal that winds its way through dozens of important trading centres in Keraniganj and Savar areas, has served millions of farmers and commuters. Today, it could at best be a grazing ground for cattle.

Dhaka by any measure is supposed to be an ideal location for human settlement -- a very few cities have four rivers encircling them. It is supposed to have constant sources of clean surface water supply, a fantastic navigability around the city, which is a source of tourism, and of entertainment for its residents -- all centring the rivers. Because of all these features, the Mughals had chosen it as their capital in Bengal.

But today, the residents of the city have almost forgotten the rivers. In their daily life bound to the traffic packed streets, they do not feel the existence of the Buriganga, Shitalakkhya, Turag, and the Balu. We have let them flow towards extinction.

But the Dhaka residents are already paying for that indifference. Groundwater extraction for supplying household water is dragging down the groundwater table by about 9 feet every year. A big underground void poses the risk that the city might collapse into the pit. It is high time we wake up.

Daily Star