Why are our rivers still dying despite so many projects?

In the mid-1960s, a survey conducted by a Dutch company for the East Pakistan Inland Water Transport Authority found 12,000 kilometres of navigable waterways across what is now Bangladesh. Today, at the height of monsoon, only about 4,500 km of these waterways remain navigable, which shrinks to 2,500 km during dry seasons—a loss of more than 60 percent navigability over six decades or so. Several major inland routes, once busy with launches and cargo, have been officially abandoned by the Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority (BIWTA) because the water simply isn’t there to carry these anymore.

This is what river management in Bangladesh has actually produced after two decades of directives, dredgers, and diplomatic ribbon-cuttings. As I wrote in an article published in Dhaka Tribune earlier this month, government orders alone cannot restore a dying waterway. Today, on World Rivers Day, it becomes fitting to wonder why such directives keep coming while the rivers keep shrinking.

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The crisis has two faces, and they compound each other. One is disappearing navigability and the other is pollution.  A survey released by BIWTA this year has now measured the pollution in Dhaka’s rivers with precision: 424 discharge points release roughly 3,30,000 kg of liquid and solid waste daily into the Buriganga, Turag, Balu, and Shitalakhya. Industries account for nearly 60 percent of the discharge; drainage systems account for another 30 percent, and households the remaining 10 percent. Of the roughly 7,000 industrial establishments operating along these rivers, an estimated 99 percent lack a functioning effluent treatment plant (ETP).

The problem is not that nothing has been done. It’s that the wrong things have been done, repeatedly, in the wrong order. One of them is dredging without a plan.

Six years ago, the government undertook a plan to dredge rivers and restore 10,000 km of navigable route. Some of this work—cutter suction dredging in Sunamganj’s Surma and Kushiyara over the past two to three years has revived trade at Barachhara, Charagaon, and Bagli customs stations. But the wider record of success is bleaker. In 2019, the Implementation Monitoring and Evaluation Division (IMED) of the planning ministry found irregularities in several river dredging projects worth nearly Tk 5,000 crore. It also found that some stretches of certain river routes were dredged more than once because the silt was dumped on river banks instead of being hauled away. So, it washed back into the river during the monsoon. Such actions cannot be called river management. It is river mining, funded annually but not really solving the loss of navigability.

Meanwhile, we now know the points through which toxic pollutants enter the river system in Dhaka. The new BIWTA survey traces pollution to its source: 66 WASA drains feeding directly into the Buriganga and Turag; 21 outlets from Dhaka South City Corporation, 16 from Dhaka North, and 37 Narayanganj City Corporation drains discharging straight into the Shitalakhya.

The outcome of this pollution has been critical both ecologically and health-wise. The dissolved oxygen in the Buriganga approaches zero at times—well below the roughly 5 mg/L needed to sustain fish. Besides, researchers have detected antibiotic residues in the river’s water, including amoxicillin and ciprofloxacin, raising concerns about antimicrobial resistance building in a river that flows by a city with more than two crore residents. Environmental architect Iqbal Habib put the core failure plainly: Dhaka’s sewage still flows into its rivers through drains, and building treatment plants without reconnecting the canal network and redesigning the drainage system will not solve the problem.

However, river pollution is not just Dhaka’s crisis. The Department of Environment monitors dozens of stations on 28 rivers nationwide, and the picture beyond the capital is no better. A 2022-23 Rivers and Delta Research Centre (RDRC) survey of 56 rivers found that dissolved oxygen in the Labandaha in Gazipur, Haridhowa in Narsingdi, and Sutang in Habiganj was below 1 mg/L. In Khulna—the district contributes to the majority of Bangladesh’s shrimp exports—the Bhairab-Rupsha system scores as low as 39 on the Canadian Water Quality Index by the time it reaches the Sundarbans, with factories discharging untreated effluent directly into water that ultimately feeds the mangrove forest and its fisheries. A national review of 40 years of urban river data now lists the Korotoa, Teesta, Rupsha, Pashur, and Padma among rivers with severe levels of pollution.

The Hazaribagh tannery’s relocation to Savar provides a miniature picture of why river pollution continues despite various government projects undertaken over the years. The tannery treatment plant, after more than Tk 500 crore being spent, still discharges roughly 15,000 cubic metres of untreated effluent daily into the Dhaleshwari. We don’t clean up pollution in this country; we merely relocate it.

Over two decades, Tk 3,294 crore was spent on the Buriganga alone, across eight separate projects—nearly all of it on dredging, demarcation, and beautification, but almost none on stopping the discharge that keeps the river dead. The Dasherkandi Sewage Treatment Plant has been built, but how much of the city’s sewage network actually connects to it remains a question.

Under the circumstances, the World Bank’s $370 million Metro Dhaka Water Security and Resilience Programme approved earlier this year adds real resources, as its first phase targets safely managed sanitation for 5.5 lakh people and a public water-quality index. But whether it would save our dying rivers remains unclear, as money and meetings have both been tried before without much success.

Three things can, however, turn survey data into results. First, use the outlet map: notify every one of the 424 identified polluters in Dhaka, with deadlines and consequences, starting with the industrial 60 percent. Second, make ETP compliance a condition of operating—at a 99 percent non-compliance rate, enforcement alone would be transformative. Third, extend the same source-mapping rigour to Gazipur, Narsingdi, Habiganj, Khulna, and beyond before those rivers match the Buriganga’s condition, and give the 2019 High Court verdict declaring rivers “living entities” real enforcement power by empowering the National River Conservation Commission to penalise, not merely recommend.

Over just two generations, Bangladesh lost more than 150 rivers. That number will not reverse itself with another dredger or another survey. It will reverse when a pollutant discharge outlet map is followed by outlets actually being closed—in Dhaka, and everywhere else where the rivers still run.

Dr Ahad Chowdhury is a geologist and environmental scientist, currently teaching at Jefferson Community and Technical College in Kentucky, US.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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