Pinaki Roy

It was just a matter of time before a tragedy of this scale befell the country's hill region. The way people felled trees, cleared forest for commercial plantation and cultivation, and built houses on hill slopes in the Chittagong region, something disastrous was bound to happen, say experts.

Prof Dwijen Sharma, an eminent naturalist, said it would not be possible to stop the conflict between nature and development as long as capitalism controls everything.

A government dispatched experts' team reached Sunamganj yesterday to collect water samples from the haors there for lab test at the Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission to ascertain whether there is any radioactive materials in the waters.

Bangladesh experiences flash floods ever so often and farmers are no stranger to crop loss as a result. But the deaths of fish, frogs and fowls in their hundreds as an aftermath of such floods are a new phenomenon altogether.

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.