According to news reports, the coastal areas of the country or 16 districts have been severely affected by unusual flood like tides in the wake of the depression like situation in the Bay of Bengal recently. The tides have breached large areas of the coastal embankments and inundated large areas from where water is failing to drain away. As a result, nearly ten million coastal people are living a life of great distress with their homesteads under water and washed away fish farms, boats, cattle, poultries and other means of livelihood.
According to a Coast Trust research, about 150km of Bangladesh’s 5,757km of coastal embankments were affected by super cyclone Amphan in the early part of the present year. The post Amphan conditions dictated the very urgent need of fastest repair, reconstruction and rebuilding of embankments in the affected Amphan hit areas as protection against future such events. But it appears that this task was taken up casually. Although the government has been doing very praiseworthy works in many other vital areas, regrettably the tasks of embankment repair and rebuilding remain relatively neglected. Furthermore, whatever works were carried out in relation to the embankments, the same were riddled with corruption. Thus, the vastly weakened embankments from the Amphan could hardly provide defences against last week’s unusual tidal surges.
Speakers at an online discussion recently demanded an immediate allocation of Tk 400 crore to build and repair coastal embankments damaged by cyclone Amphan and now the tides. They also asked the government to ensure Tk12,000 crore in allocations each fiscal year to build sustainable embankments in coastal areas.
The online discussion titled “Save Embankments and Save Economic Activity of Coastal People Through National Budget 2020-21” was jointly organised by Coast Trust – a non-governmental organisation – and Campaign for Sustainable Rural Livelihood – a national network of individuals, organisations and institutions. Chairman of Polli Karma Sohayak Foundation Qazi Kholiquzzaman presided over the function while Rezaul Karim Chowdhury, executive director of Coast Trust, moderated it.
Saber Hossain Chowdhury, chairman of Standing Committee on Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, noted economist Dr Qazi Kholiquzzaman, lawmaker Akhtaruzzaman Babu, and Dhaka University Professor Dr Mahbuba Nasrin spoke, among others, at the occasion. Qazi Kholiquzzaman said a special budgetary allocation is a must to recover the losses of the coastal people. Otherwise, many will lose their employment and the areas will become prone to worse poverty. An immediate survey should be conducted in this regard, he added.
It is not that the government is too unmindful of the problem. It has had several coastal embankment projects under various nomenclatures and periods. There was the Coastal Embankment Project (CEP) implemented during the 1960s and early 1970s. And following the two severe cyclones, SIDR and AILA, that hit the coastal zone with devastating effect, the Coastal Embankment Improvement Project, and under it various other schemes, were formulated and their implementation attempted with international financing.
But the problem is that the long network of embankments, running into hundreds of miles, seldom fully stands a storm surge. The standard of work and of course poor quality of construction materials combine to render these protection barriers brittle. There is need to construct newer embankments every year, apart from regular repair and maintenance . But the works must be done absolutely incorruptibly. It is credibly alleged that hundreds and hundreds of crores of Taka have just gone down the drain from unpardonable ‘corruption’ in the building, rebuilding, strengthening and maintaining the networks of embankments. Such callous loss of precious national resources cannot go on unpunished.
Government must do two things immediately : Fastest possible engagement in works along the total length and breadth of the embankments network. Second, all spending in the works must be carried out with zero corruption to fetch the best results from durable and effective embankments.
