Hill cutting on as city fathers sleep

Scenic natural settings are being destroyed as unscrupulous people are still engaged in hill cutting. A hill in Baizid Bostami area stands as testimony to the illegal act. PHOTO: STAR

The worst suffering areas of the unabated hill cutting are Khulshi, Panchlaish, Sholoshahar, Baizid Bostami, Foy's Lake, Lalkhan Bazar, Oxygen Intersection, Pahartali, Kattali and Polytechnic area.

Sources said unscrupulous people from various levels of society -- including local goons, influential political men, truck owners, contractors, brick kiln owners, real estate developers and even some concerned government officials -- are working together as a chained syndicate in the lucrative business of illegal and rampant hill cutting in the port city. Of them, the most powerful are the local 'mastaans' and influential political quarters operating behind the scenes, they said.

Worse still, a government act promulgated in the early nineties to abate the hill cutting has, because of its many loopholes, helped further the illegal acts of the syndicate rather than discouraging them.

Various environmentalist groups, as well as members of civil society, have protested the destruction of the hills through rallies, processions, seminars and human chains. But their appeals seem so far to have fallen on deaf ears.

The syndicates are now stretching their greedy grip to the proposed site of Asian University for Women (AUW), a multi-million dollar project on 104-acres of land near Bayezid Bostami for which Prime Minister Khaleda Zia laid the foundation stone in January last year. The university, which is to be funded by the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) at an estimated cost of Tk 1,000 crore, will be built on a scenic hill and house 2,000 students, following the pattern of the Thailand-based Asian Institute of Technology (AIT).

But the proposed site of AUW will be endangered if the criminal syndicates are not prevented from hill cutting in and around the proposed site, architect and urban planner Zarina Hossain expressed her concern.

She said, "The hills in and around urban Chittagong are a unique gift of nature. Rampant and indiscriminate hill cutting to create flat sites for new housing and for other uses is destroying these."

"A flattened, subdivided plot is regarded by developers, real estate agents and individuals to be the only suitable site for construction. This poses a serious threat to the unique topography, ecology and visual richness of the hilly areas," she observed, urging the authorities concerned to take necessary measures to stop the rampant hill cutting in the site area and other parts of the city.