NEWS reports in a national daily quoting professionals blamed unplanned urbanization as the biggest risk to citizens’ life, besides reckless use of valuable land in ever growing urbanization in and around the capital and other cities. At a seminar in the city on Friday on Housing Regeneration; strengthening communities economists, town planners, architects and representatives of RAJUK and such other regulatory bodies took part in the discussion. They particularly pointed at the lack of coordination among the regulatory authorities such as Water Development Board, WASA and City Corporations and absence of monitoring of unplanned growth of cities for creating the biggest risks. They called for a fresh look into all these issues to make sure the orderly development of urbanization to avoid the mess.
As we see regulatory bodies like RAJUK and Directorate of Public Housing are failing to play their role to ensure planned development of urbanization and the causes of failure are many including undue influence of powerful persons that force them to overlook breach of Housing Rules and Laws. Bribing RAJUK’s field inspectors is also allowing aversion of safety standards at construction site. Absence of professionals in the right place like town planners, architects and engineers are also allowing things to go wrong. The regulatory bodies are administered by non-professional bureaucrats who are not aware of the sensitivities of city planning thereby compromising the regulations in setting up new housing projects.
It is indeed alarming as the experts have pointed out that expansion of major cities including capital Dhaka and Chittagong is taking place without enough road links for fire brigade vehicles at many places to enter during emergency. They lack proper sanitation, drainage and public parks for residents to go for a walk. New houses are being built wall to wall without leaving space between the holdings. Water logging is the biggest problem in the cities with narrow streets moreover causing traffic jam throughout the year. Disaster may take big tolls if we don’t restore discipline in the housing sector.
At present housing companies owned by powerful people are grabbing the flood plane land around Dhaka city breaking the law where RAJUK and such other statutory bodies appear helpless. Everyone knows the impact of such grabbing because drainage of rain and floodwater from the city will be blocked with creation of new housing on such land. Such grabbing of canals from within the Dhaka city is the biggest cause of water logging in the metropolis.
The country is losing around 69,000 hectares of agricultural land every year because of unplanned housing and experts have therefore rightly pointed out that time is passing out to take the entire urbanization process under strict regulation and monitoring before indiscipline is going to create the biggest mess in the housing sector.
