Can a state institution just gobble up land?

It's alarming to know that the state-run Bangladesh Agricultural Development Corporation (BADC) has filled 11 acres of a 53-acre water retention area in Gabtoli, Dhaka in violation of the Environment Conservation (Amendment) Act-2010. Even more alarmingly, the Dhaka North City Corporation (DNCC), Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakkha (Rajuk), and the Department of Environment (DoE) – which together were responsible for the land – did nothing to prevent the filling although it continued for over six months until March. The area in question is marked as water retention land in the Detailed Area Plan (DAP). Reportedly, the BADC got neither a land use clearance from Rajuk nor any environmental clearance certificate from the DoE, both of which are mandatory.

A correspondent of this newspaper found that the BADC has set up a fence around the area and an excavator was being used to level it. Using a dredger, the height of the ground has been raised by up to about six feet. All these activities, locals fear, will adversely affect the drainage in and around Gabtoli City Colony, Goidertak, Mirpur, Mazar Road, Mohammadia Housing, Mohammadia Homes, Navodaya Housing, Shyamoli Housing, and Mansoorabad Housing. They also said that when it rains, waterlogging happens in that area. Earlier, some of the water used to recede through the now-occupied land. Now that it has been filled up, they expect the waterlogging problem to get worse.

After much delay, the DNCC, which made lofty promises about preventing waterlogging in the past, wrote to the BADC on March 29 to suspend the land development work. It also concurred that construction of a proposed four-story building meant for a tissue culture laboratory would seriously obstruct drainage. Unless the land filling is stopped and reversed, it will badly affect locals by aggravating the waterlogging problem. While the BADC is the obvious guilty party here, we cannot help but ask why the DNCC failed to intervene sooner or more strongly, as it should have.

Meanwhile, Rajuk, just like the DoE, pretended to have no idea about what has been going on with a category of land deemed extremely important for a city to function. Contradicting all their versions, however, the project director of the Central Tissue Culture and Seed Health Laboratory at the BADC claimed that there was no water retention land at the project site. Additionally, he claimed to have obtained permissions from the authorities concerned when the project was approved, but failed to produce any document to back up his claim. So, the question is, which of these government organisations is lying?

As things stand, it is the BADC that must take responsibility for how things turned out. The way it has gone about occupying or filling that crucial land, without any care about its environmental effect or the suffering of the people, is completely unacceptable. It just shows how unaccountable some of the government organisations have become. We urge the higher authorities to immediately stop the land filling in Gabtoli, and restore and properly preserve the water retention area.