Pinaki Roy

Farmers in the northeastern backswamp are all too familiar with flash floods. Rice paddies grown just once a year in this vast haor remain at the mercy of nature. But thousands of growers in this wetland ecosystem had never experienced flash floods striking this early as in this season, completely destroying paddies in over one lakh hectares of land.

A huge quantity of dissolved salt will be discharged into the Dhaleshwari river from the Savar Tannery Industrial Estate as the central effluent treatment plant (CETP) there doesn't have the component needed for desalinising wastewater. Even if all the other toxic materials are treated, the salt will kill the biodiversity of the river, say, environmentalists. The country's tannery industry uses around 40,000 tonnes of salt annually.

The government has given Hazaribagh tanners three more months to relocate their factories to Savar Tannery Industrial Estate, as the tanners again missed the deadline -- December 31-- for doing so.

The house being set afire by a policeman and a person in a pink shirt as seen in an Al Jazeera video belonged to Chumki Mardi, a 55-year-old Santal woman.

The situation there was all very happy. As the troops were advancing towards the newly liberated capital, people standing along the road cheered them, chanting "joy bangla". They thanked the troops and other freedom fighters.

The hill people had to struggle and make sacrifices for achieving the Chittagong Hill Tracts Peace Accord. Every single family there was affected in one way or the other. Since its signing, 19 years have gone by but the hill people are yet to see its full implementation.

The Santals had owned most of the land, now at the centre of a row in Gobindaganj of Gaibandha, before the government acquired it in the 50s, according to old land records.

Hundreds of fishermen in coastal and other districts are passing hard days, as they are yet to get the promised food support in compensation from the government for not catching hilsa during the ongoing ban.

The developing economies are more vulnerable to climate change as they are closely tied to climate-sensitive sectors like

Sustainable and renewable energy is the future and time has come to enhance international cooperation to facilitate its supply for all as one in every five people still lack access to electricity, said experts yesterday.

The ecologically critical area of the Sundarbans is becoming an industrial zone with the permission of the Department of Environment and the government has done nothing to stop it so far.

The fly ash to be generated from the Rampal coal-fired power plant has the potential to cause “substantial” damage to the

For yet another year, the city's leather industry hub in Hazaribagh continues to face serious environmental pollution and health hazards for the people living in and around the area, thanks to the delay in relocating the tanneries to Savar.

The government has not yet completed the construction work of the Central Effluent Treatment Plant (CETP) at Savar although Hazaribagh tanners are under constant pressure to relocate their businesses there.

The site of Modhumoti Model Town project, which has been declared illegal by the top court, has been expanded by filling an adjacent lake and the lowland along the Dhaka-Savar road. During a recent visit there, this correspondent found the lake almost filled. At least 30 trucks were dumping soil into the water body.

Bangladesh has acquired a several thousand square kilometres of new land over the last four decades, owing largely to deltas forming on major rivers and in the coastal areas.

Yet another deadline has gone by, but not a single tannery has been relocated from the capital's Hazaribagh to the Savar Tannery Industrial Estate. In fact, the government itself has not been able to fully install the Central Effluent Treatment Plant (CETP). Proper treatment of toxic waste discharged by the tanneries was described as a key objective of the whole relocation move.

Although the government has set March 1 as the new deadline for moving the tanneries to Savar, not a single factory building there is ready for relocation by the time. The central effluent treatment plant (CETP), the most essential component of the project, is not ready either. Hardly 50 percent work of the plant has been completed.

The government is not paying adequate attention to the health hazards caused by arsenic contamination even though millions of people are exposed to it, says Professor Abul Hussam, a US researcher of Bangladesh origin.

The quality of air in the capital is extremely unhealthy. The presence of pollutant particles in its air even on a normal day is more than six times the healthy limit. If this sounds scary, then you should know that the air in its neighbouring cities Gazipur and Narayanganj is even worse, according to the Department of Environment (DoE).