Business Desk :
The government is in a horn of dilemma over implementation of Detailed Area Plan (DAP) which is inconsistent with reality and fraught with some sort of peculiar ideas.
This DAP is full of errors, distortion and motivated deviation. If it is implemented, lakhs of people will lose their homesteads and the government will face massive public discontent.
In the reports of intelligence agencies also, the likely consequence of DAP implementation has been mentioned. The opposition parties will come out in the streets to destabilise the government capitalising on the public discontent. Even many supporters of the ruling party will join this protest out of their grievance for being evicted from the ancestral homesteads. As a result, it will be almost impossible for the government to contain that resistance. On the other hand, the government will have to bear the responsibility of failure if it is unable to implement the DAP. Under this circumstances, experts concerned feel that it is most urgent to amend the DAP on the basis of realistic information and data.
An area of 1590 square kilometers has been brought under the DAP formulated for Dhaka. Vast areas of Gazipur, Narayanganj and Narshingdi districts have also been included in the DAP. The classification of flood-prone areas, water-bodies, playgrounds, roads and agricultural lands has been made without on-the spot observation. Now, to implement it many people shall have to be evicted from their homesteads they have been residing in for generations. They will also lose graveyard and land needed for constructing residential houses also. Many factories, business establishments and commercial-residential areas will have to be evicted. Not only thousands of homesteads and buildings but many multistoried buildings used for residential purposes for year after year will also be required to be demolished and the cost of doing all this will amount to many millions of taka. Can the national economy bear the brunt of this? What can be a more peculiar plan than this?
The gazette of DAP was published in 2010 very much on the basis of structural plan formulated in 1995. But within this 15 years Dhaka has expanded much. So, just after the publication of the gazette of this unrealistic DAP, massive discontent spread in different areas. People of certain areas of Gazipur had risen in protest and the administration then witnessed how widespread can be the protest and resistance of the people for protecting ancestral homesteads and lands. Not only the affected people, the public representatives of the areas under DAP also are against this unrealistic DAP. Nobody is against planned urbalisation and environment-based habitation. Public representatives, housing traders and common people-all are in favour of planned urbanisation. But that has to be done in a realistic way and on the basis of the well-thought and well-planned suggestions of the experts concerned. The affected people should be consulted and convinced in this regard. This can never be implemented by imposition from the upper-level and at the cost of lakhs of people. We hope the government will move in the right direction.
