BY 2030, the urban population of Bangladesh will override the rural population, although the rate has slowed in the last three years due to Covid-19, extended road communications in the rural areas, high living costs in urban settings, etc. Every day, up to 2,000 people move to Dhaka, making it the world’s fastest-growing megacity. Dhaka has already started feeling the heat of an overcrowded populace with traffic jams and water-logging becoming almost a routine problem. The current population of 1.8 crore in Dhaka is already deprived of basic facilities like housing, healthcare, electricity, and clean water. If the population continues to increase, residing in Dhaka would become unbearable.
Many of the migrated people end up living in informal settlements, lacking access to basic services like housing, infrastructure, safe drinking water, sanitation, health, and education. The internal migration should be checked by administrative functions and basic facilities decentralisation. In an area where people live, the quality of water and air, noise level, light level, and waste management system should be good. But unfortunately, we see that Dhaka is a city of polluted air, it has a lot of noise pollution, the waste management system is absolutely shaky, there is a shortage of safe drinking water, adulterated food is found in abundance, and there is a shortage of fast access to healthcare. For all these reasons, Dhaka remains one of the least liveable cities.
Therefore, to make Dhaka liveable, we need a great push from within the government. Decentralisation of power, empowerment of local governments and the establishment of more city councils could be some good first steps. All councils should have their own strategic five to 10-year plan. And involving local inhabitants in project implementation should be strongly considered. In order for Bangladesh to truly become a developed country, Dhaka would need to be transformed into a global city by 2041. That will require more research and effort to discover a planning strategy that would best suit Dhaka.
