A national daily on Friday featured a photo that depicted people living in the houses presented as gifts from the Prime Minister wading through knee-deep water in Pallipara Manikdipa Ashrayan project in Bogura’s Shajahanpur as rain inundated the road connecting those. In January, the local administration handed over nine houses to the homeless families as gifts marking Mujib Borsho. The houses that went under knee-deep water pushed the people to be under the sky again. The government aimed at providing 120,000 homes to homeless and landless households across the country last January but due to poor construction and lack of service roads, water, sanitation, and drainage facilities plus low floor levels made many houses unlivable.
The nine houses were built under the Ashrayon Prokolpo-2 at a cost of Tk 15.39 lakh by the Department of Disaster Management in 2020. Nine individuals, including six widows, moved in six months ago. Locals said it was no surprise that the houses have been flooded, because the low-lying plot of land, on which these have been built, always got flooded during monsoon. Some said they pointed this out to the officials at the outset, but they didn’t pay heed to their advice.
The occupants of the houses said they suffered a lot as water engulfed their homes, toilets, and tubewells. Last week’s rain collected water that still inundated the homes’ front and back yards, making the area a hotspot for mosquito breeding. The local administration said they had no other land to build the houses for the homeless occupants.
The media widely applauded the government for giving homes to homeless people. The local administration got the offer to construct the homes and homeless people were instantly given possession of those. Nobody checked the quality and livability of the homes, constructed poorly. All stakeholders achieved their targets, except the allottees, whose dreams have been shattered with the fall of pillars, flood, and unavailability of basic amenities. The government talks of sustainable development but in action it has done the opposite.
