The district administration in Munshiganj violated law by leasing out a 12-acre foreshore and floodplains of the Meghna in Char Betagi, said National River Conservation Commission Chairman Muzibur Rahman Howlader.
A river under onslaught. An open defiance of a High Court order. And inept river custodians.
A team of soon-to-retire engineers and an administration official are leaving for the US and the UK on a two-week trip ostensibly to learn about digging canals, protecting river banks, restoring embankments, and dredging rivers, which they had been doing for over three decades.
What was once considered encroachment has become outright murder. But the seriousness of the crime has done little to deter a carnival of corruption plaguing river management.
The apex court in 2009 directed the government to demarcate the original territory of the four Dhaka rivers -- Buriganga, Turag, Balu Shitalakhya -- restore those rivers to their original state and protect them against grabbing and from pollution.
Over 95 percent of the structures under Rajuk’s jurisdiction were built without building approval, according to survey findings for the ongoing revision of the capital city’s Detailed Area Plan (DAP).
Despite tragic loss of lives and properties in repeated building disasters, the country’s national building code has been lying largely unimplemented for 26 years, getting obsolete in the absence of an enforcement authority, said leading professionals.
The deplorable conditions of the rivers around Dhaka city and elsewhere in the country due to encroachment and pollution are the result of inaction of the river custodians and their complicity with the grabbers for decades, National River Conservation Commission Chairman Muzibur Rahman Howlader has said.
All river grabbing and pollution are criminal offences, the highest court in the country has declared in the full text of a landmark judgment.
The metro rail construction work on 8km of the capital’s key thoroughfares has made the chaotic traffic even worse, largely because steps have not been taken for better use of the narrowed down streets, experts and officials said.
A private dockyard company has been building two slipways in the Meghna river in Munshiganj’s Gazaria even after the National River Commission asked the firm to stop its work and free the river.
The National River Conservation Commission has warned that it would take legal actions against at least a dozen government authorities for their inaction to free the Meghna from grabbers if they do not act within seven days.
In an onslaught on the Meghna, a private ship-building company is constructing its shipyard’s slipways into the river at Meghnaghat in Sonargaon, but the river custodians are doing little to stop it.
Building and fire safety conditions in all the 1,818 high rises under Rajuk’s jurisdiction are scary, its chairman Md Abdur Rahman said yesterday.
While the 23-storey FR Tower on Kemal Ataturk Avenue has a foundation for 18 storeys, around a dozen other high rises on the same street are taller than permissible height but Rajuk has been silent about this all along, said government high officials.
Although Rajuk officials had no engineering plan to knock down the much-talked about BGMEA building on the capital's Begunbari canal, they went to the site yesterday heavily equipped with demolition machinery.
Violating the then building rules, Rajuk in December 1996 approved an 18-storey high-rise in Banani, where the FR Tower stands today.
Rajuk is approving commercial buildings in the residential areas of Gulshan and Banani with virtually no height limits and experts are calling it illegal and a recipe for disaster.