Fast vanishing of Dhaka's liveability

In spite of its spectacular development in many sectors, notably communication, Dhaka still remains plagued with scores of problems. Most of those are too raw and rudimentary to befit the declared goals of this city. Given the state of its anomalous development spree, many are doubtful about its meeting, finally, the aspiration of emerging as a tolerably advanced city. To the woes of many old residents of the once-idyllic Dhaka, the city remains deficient on a number of counts. The country's capital lacks the basic urban amenities which are normally associated with livability. In order to elaborate on this feature, one might point out its ill-planned traffic movement network.  Footpath encroachment by hawkers leading to traffic gridlocks almost throughout the day remains a major problem. Besides reckless jaywalking, road blocks resulting from accidents and on flimsy grounds, and many other hindrances keep making large segments of the roads veritably dysfunctional.

The latest menace which has started afflicting the frenziedly growing city for the last few years is an unusual form of water-logging caused by heavy rain. Except some exclusive and high-end areas and the roads passing through them, the city remains under stagnant rain water for long hours. A spell of night-long rain in last mid-September caused the Dhaka New Market shopping centre to stay submerged under waist-deep water for one-and-half days. Similar flooding of middle and lower middle class areas is now a recurrent phenomenon in Dhaka. Roads and walkways submerged by spells of heavy rain cause great hazards including deaths. They occur due to humans' coming into contact with severed live wire which lies hidden in ankle-deep water. This is what has happened during the long bout of rain that battered Dhaka recently, in which four persons died.

Water-logging of relatively low-lying areas has emerged as an urban scourge in Dhaka for over two decades. Amazingly, the Dhaka residents were completely stranger to it even in the mid-1960s. In those days, non-stop night-long rain would witness in the morning few areas in the city water-logged, except the extremely low-lying swathes in the suburban areas. Thanks to Dhaka's low population in those days, a properly functional drainage could operate in those days. Moreover, dumping of municipal waste into public places indiscriminately had yet to become a general practice. The city's drainage network went haywire after the country's independence, when people began arriving in Dhaka in droves to have the taste of a better life. Unabated increase in solid wastes played a great role in the decline of the city's atmospheric balance. It was in the seventies that over a dozen functional canals became victims of the grabbers' syndicates. Many eventually turned into ditches filled with viscous fetid water. At present, the locations of the Dhaka canals are found only in the site plans of the city planners.

In order to emerge as an ideal city, Dhaka ought to deal with its pressing problems without frittering away its time. Already unsolved problems keep multiplying. Access to market of essentials is difficult. Scourges like dengue and air and dust pollution turn terrible; with long unheard-of problems threatening to return with vengeance. Violence of different types and slide in law and order has started digging in their heels. Life in the capital is fast becoming fraught with a feeling of unease. All this may hinder the country's graduation into a middle-income country.

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