A news item in a national daily on Sunday said around 81 percent of the nation’s safe drinking water budget now alone goes for Dhaka city and that too with special focus on the city’s posh areas. It said Dhaka Water Supply and Sewerage Authority (DWASA) has initiated a special safe water supply line project to replace the existing one at a cost of $150 million this time to Gulshan, Banani, Baridhara, Dhanmondi, Mirpur and Badda while the tariff on city water supply is equal for all. The special initiative has been taken at a time when residents in many parts of the old city even do not get adequate supply and whatever they get is partly dirty in the summer.
We are not for one section of the city dwellers against others. What we invariably want to say is that there must be an equitable approach based on everybody’s need and the availability of annual funds. According to a UNICEF report released on Friday, Bangladesh stands 7th in the list of the top 10 countries where the poor suffer from a lack of adequate drinking water. The ruling Awami League in its election manifesto of 2008 and again in 2014 reiterated its commitment to provide safe water to all, however without giving a time line only to show its lip service to the basic problem. Contrary to it, the special initiative for the city’s posh areas now shows that powerful people are taking the advantage while the cause of the poor remain altogether neglected.
The UNICEF report moreover showed that no fund was spent in the past five years for supplying safe water to the Chittagong Hill Tracts, chars and haor areas. The department of public health engineering which is responsible for providing safe drinking water across the country, except in Dhaka, Chittagong, Rajshahi and Khulna, either has no sufficient allocation or the institutional and political leadership here is unable to mitigate the problem.
Chittagong WASA is now unable to supply adequate water and is rotating the supply on a daily basis to different parts of the city. Khulna and Rajshahi’s water and sewerage authorities have also very limited coverage while salinity is affecting the supply of safe drinking water all over. More curiously, in this situation the government is also limiting its activities in district towns and municipal areas by installing community based tube-wells like the NGOs instead of installing water treatment plants using river waters to cover the broader population. Even Aila cyclone hit people of 2008 are yet to get sweet water supply in many parts of the Shatkhira district, the report said to tend many people to wonder whether or not they have an equitable share in the national budget.
We hold the view that Dhaka city is not the entire country and when a big disparity is at work in the city itself, the deprivation of majority of the people from safe drinking water may eventually hit the public by their being exposed to tropical diseases. The situation can’t be acceptable. We ask the government to give more allocations for rural safe water supply and prove its leadership to address the issue without wasting time.
