‘’Dhaka is the least livable city in the world!” This very statement is painful and frustrating when I know,no matter how chronically ill Dhaka is,this is my city and I shall have to learn to live with it.
Superfluously we have things running well.The Metro rail is nearing completion. More and more traffic policemen are getting aware of the traffic laws. Nowadays you hardly see any motorbike rider without a helmet. Unauthorised buildings are being demolished to pave highways. Tall buildings are replacing single unit houses. With increasing number of flyovers, we are not far away from the spaghetti junctions webbing our intersections. Skyline of the city has already started to look like any other city in the region.
Arrival of Uber, Pathao, Bkash and other likes changed our lives forever. We no longer have to wait by the roadside haggling with the three-wheelers to reach our destinations. No longer do we fear of the notorious “molom parties” swooping onto our vehicles and robbing us of our belonging. ‘’Digital Bangladesh” has stopped us fighting in long queues to pay our utility bills. It has eased our lifestyle to a great extent.
But money, skyscrapers and elevated junctions cannot buy happiness. Most recently Dhaka has been rated as the second most polluted city in the world after Delhi. The air pollution index mainly points its finger at the thousands of construction sites spewing tiny and heavy particles into the air. Its effects are graver on public health during the dry season. The megacity is also a noise maker to a maddening proportion. Vehicular noise, construction sites, use of loud speakers and thousand other human activities make our city one of the noisiest in the world.
Few years ago a top engineer of the Dhaka WASA Drainage Circle said it was almost impossible to stop waterlogging in the city.
“Recently we employed a group of workers to clean our storm sewerage,”he said, adding, “ you know we found rotten quilts, mattresses, pillows, broken TV sets and tons of polythene bags during the cleanup. How do you cope with waterlogging with such irresponsible behavior from the city dwellers?” he asked.
The frustrated engineer knew it is a near impossible task, with so little infrastructure, to manage the drainage channels. In Dhaka over 45,000 people share a space of one square kilometer, making this city the most densely populated in the world. By 2025 the population of Dhaka city will surpass that of Mexico City, Beijing and Shanghai.
The 36 natural canals which crisscrossed the city and functioned as a formidable storm sewerage were all obliterated over the years. The existing sewerage system developed recently is far from adequate during the monsoon. Lack of household garbage collection covers about 40 percent of the households in the city. The rest of the garbage generated is either dumped into the rivers or just by the roadside.
Since the pandemic hit the world, thousands of people have lost their jobs. Male and female garment workers who had found opportunities in the city suddenly went jobless. Rural migration to Dhaka, which was estimated to be half a million a year, reportedly dropped sharply within the period of pandemic. Hundreds of families have moved back from Dhaka to their ancestral homes in the rural areas.Sale of portable vacuum flasks skyrocketed as unemployed men and women, with their meagre investment, took to selling tea, cigarettes, beetle leaves and biscuits by the roadside, often moving from one area to another. A new breed of delivery men with bicycles and motorbikes found ways of survival. According to a police official in Motijheel, a busy commercial hub, over the last few months, presence of kerb crawlers has significantly risen too.
From the very beginning of the urbanization process, the city lacked a competent public sector. The sector grew alone as an orphan drifting from one station to another. There are posh places like Dhanmondi, Gulshan, Banani and lately Uttara, Rajuk, Public Works Departmentand National Housing Society planned housing remedies for the government officials and selected citizens of the country. But hundreds of thousands of acres of city land was abandoned to grow on its own. It was a feast that none could miss. Today, in areas of the city, buildings grew on even a single decimal of land at places without any access roads to them. In our overall planning our vision for a good living did not seem to exist.
The ancient Romans, Greeks, Moghuls and even Islamic settlers in Bengal had built effective drainage systems for their townships and cities hundreds of years ago.In order to curtail traffic congestions, Roman city authorities under the Emperor banned commercial carts from plying the streets of Rome during daytime.
Now unearthed by the Department of Archeology, ancient township ofBagherhat in the southwest, for instance, bears the testimony of their civic sense.
In the case of Dhaka such visionary handicap has outpaced almost all developments andresulted in creation of a dysfunctional megacity.
While we are talking about the inner city scenario, the suburbs of Dhaka in all direction are growing phenomenally. And the growth is a direct assault on our urban landscape. An assault that could hardly be reversed. In any direction away from the capital the developers are indiscriminately filling up canals, marshy and agricultural land and even rivers co convert into housing plots.
All thesehousing estates are totally unauthorized by the Rajuk, the sole authority of the republic to oversee the process of growth and development of Dhaka. Dhaka Structural Plan envisages expansion of the city by transforming suburban and agricultural land to cater for the humongous demand but it looks increasingly evident that the city authorities have already lost control on urban growth and management.
Townships with hundreds of buildings as high as 15 storied have grown in the periphery of the city without any authorization whatsoever. The situation looked so helpless at places that some of these private housingofficials had to put up signboards within their housing boundary urging home builders to abide by the Rajukbuilding rules to avoiddisasters. Mile after mile of peripheral landscape is now dotted with skeleton structures or occasional multi-storied housing units.
For a real estate developer it all starts from a dozen or more politically influential local land owners getting together to start a housing society business, mostly registered under the Joint Stock Exchange, an organization having nothing to do with urban issues. Equipped with the registration, the group then enacts huge signboards on the land to announce their arrival. They force farmers and other small landowners to submit their land to them in exchange for a nominal price. Any refusal is confronted with heavy handed actions. Helpless landowners often resort to lengthy lawsuits but in most cases they give up, knowing they could probably never win against the powerful cartels.
The future of the city we live in, is simply unpredictable. We do not know how law and order will prevail. Neither do we know what happens when the living conditions are negotiated with tiny pigeon holes on the highrises without any civic amenities around them.
