Alaul Alam :
Bangladesh is called a riverine country for its belonging of a great number of big and small rivers all around. But how long the country will be able to hold the status of being a riverine one is the question of the day. It is no denial that from the time immemorial the rivers have been contributing significantly to our lives and livelihoods. Our life is directly or indirectly dependent on the mercy of the rivers surrounding us. Can we deny the contribution of rivers in an agrarian society? Obviously, the answer will be negative.
But despite the rivers playing a huge important role in our socio-economic context, how far we realize the true importance of our rivers. In many cases, our attitudes towards the rivers do not prove that rivers are our living entities and our existence mostly becomes impossible without the generosity of rivers. Rather, alarmingly a great number of rivers are on the verge of extinction and mainly our wise acts contribute to dying of all those.
It is estimated that at one time we had 700 rivers. According to many reports, more than a hundred rivers have already died since independence. Not only that, there are around 405 rivers in the country facing serious threats either for climate change or for many more man-made cruelties such as rampant grabbing and indiscriminate polluting .
Again, it is evident that man has somehow a connection to accelerating climatic change as many more unwise acts we are doing that go on influencing the environment and our survival on earth with negative consequences.
Not only big rivers are being threatened but also a large number of small rivers along with their branches are found critically endangered. The causes are many that lead to extinction of our rivers along with their surrounding resources. The land grabbers and the dishonest syndicates are mostly responsible for the rivers to die.
Things are found alarming that how people are doing unwise acts and showing cruelties against our river resources. It is true that in many cases, the politically grown up syndicates using their muscle power are not only destroying our rivers but also the surrounding biodiversity causing great harms to animals and many other species.
Again sand lifting from the rivers is enormously affecting the ways of rivers. The syndicates who are involved in sand lifting business hardly pay any heed to the country’s law and order and in most cases, the locals hardly dare to lodge any complaint against them. Due to the river bed heavily affected, natural disasters such as flood, cyclones, etc. have become an annual occurrence in the country.
On top of that, the syndicates are found to fill up the adjacent lands of the riverbed along with water bodies and build up personal infrastructures but in many cases, their ill-doings are untouched by the law which is really shocking.
Truly, in the rural areas the branches of many rivers have been turned into cultivable lands as for years there is no initiatives found to dredge those, rather different types of wastages create blockades and accelerate their ends up. Sometimes, we see that the grabbers create barricade amid the rivers and cultivate fishes which disrupts the normal ways of the rivers.
It is no doubt that the rivers in the city areas are more vulnerable. Due to the major industrialization in the cities, the rivers undergo serious threats. Once the river Buriganga was the inspiration and living entity for the people in the city which is about to face extinction these days due to unabated grabbing, rampant dumping of waste and pollution.
According to estimation, there are over 7,000 industries in Dhaka and its adjacent areas alone producing a huge waste. The waste of these industries is connected to the sewerage systems which end up in the rivers polluting water and disrupting the environment in a large scale though the government has advised the concerned to take up initiatives to save river pollution.
Apart from this, modern technology-dependent cultivation has a severe impact on our rivers. It is true that insecticide and chemical fertilizers help to grow more foods but contrarily they cause river pollution when they wash away into the rivers. Due to the rampant use of these chemicals, fishes and other species face the extinction.
Since the civilization, river ways have been used for transporting goods around the world. When the communication facilities on roads were not developed, people would choose the river ways as the only means of exporting and importing their goods.
Even people were habituated to travel from one place to another by river ways. Also these days a large portion of people find river ways comfortable. But it is sad that rivers have lost their ways and also are the people living on the rivers. We hardly see the boatmen sailing boats with singing traditional Bengali songs.
( Alaul Alam teaches at Prime University. Email: [email protected])
