Space For Rent
Friday, April 29, 2016, Baishakh 16, 1423 BS, Rajab 21, 1437 Hijri


Lost in transition
Mahfuzur Rahman
Published :Friday, 29 April, 2016,  Time : 12:00 AM  View Count : 25
Your eyes will surely thank you if you get out of Dhaka to see our rural Bangladesh. There are beautiful villages with lush greeneries - small but infinite! I frequently visit my village home in Chittagong to discover more. This is how I was talking to a World Bank senior official in 2010. I told her that my village infuses a breath of fresh air into my travels as I spend time away from the bustling crowds of Dhaka city. Our villages are our old-world that take us to another era. The World Bank official agreed and then took a tour of a northern district.
Our village, with its quiet tree-lined tin-shed low-scale houses, was considered one of the most desirable neighbourhoods in Mirsarai upazila. Barely a decade back, me and my cousin, who happens to be a British citizen, roamed around villages in our neighbourhood as he had been in Bangladesh for vacationing. We just wondered how the villagers changed their lifestyle. Gone are the days now!
The alarming thing started happening for the last few years with the neo rich constructing unplanned buildings destroying farmlands and old houses. It is now bricks and motor vehicles - ugly houses and CNG-run auto-rickshaws. This has been the way of life now. When the edges start to get sharper, there are reasons for us to be worried about.
The building boom has triggered various businesses of brick and sand supplies. Amid the growing demand, brick kilns have sprung up, polluting the environment. These brick kilns have unleashed another business - firewood supply. So, felling trees here and there have become a too common scene where there is brick baking. It is double blow to the environment. These brick fields polluting the environment with its gas emission on one hand and reducing the land fertility on the other. Besides, the villagers are cutting down their trees on their homesteads for selling those to the brick kiln owners, also causing harm to the environment.
As happens when you have money or you start earning it unexpectedly! These days, rural people arrange wedding ceremonies in community centres and randomly use bottled water and beverages only to dump the left out bottles into ponds and on arable lands. Until recently, such littering was an urban issue, and now it has migrated to rural areas. Make a tour of your beloved village and walk around carefully, you will see the ponds in your neighbourhood have turned into dumping spots.
More alarming is that unplanned expansion and construction of houses and industries in many areas of the country are eating up valuable agricultural lands across the country. Fast-shrinking agricultural lands have already stoked fears of a food crisis as Bangladesh is failing to curb the indiscriminate transfer of arable lands to other uses in the absence of a proper law.
Bangladesh has got some 14.4 million hectares of land with 8.52 million hectares being the cultivable ones. If the evil drive to use our farmland for non-farming activities continues as we are sadly seeing now, our agriculture will surely receive a big blow in the years to come. How we could forget that it is the agriculture that still contributes 18 percent to our GDP unlike 33 percent in the early 1980s. Our economy is now in its rapid transition towards industrialisation as the government's focus has been on development, no matter what, though the country's 70 percent of its total labour force is there in the farming sector.
Apart from all this, there is a climate change issue that has kept us worrying all the time. Climate has got a big influence on our farming. Amid such onslaught and fear, villagers have been on an unfazed drive to build new comfortable houses caring little about the environment. Now throughout our Mirsarai upazila as elsewhere in the country there has been a construction boom. The neo rich are moving towards the upazila headquarters from their remote, impoverished areas, mounting huge pressure on civic amenities. Schools are now overcrowded, while transportation is emerging as another problem.
As the croplands are giving way to various types of buildings creating eventual environment concerns with villagers constructing houses and factories on agricultural land ignoring rules, experts warn that the problem will take a more dangerous turn after 10-15 years.
The good news is that the government has taken the issue seriously with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina warning that her administration will not allow anyone to set up industries indiscriminately destroying farmlands and forests. She rather suggests that industries could be set up on 100 special
economic zones being established across the country.
According to a media report, the government has planned to form a regularity authority for construction of buildings at district, upazila and union levels other than towns. After the incident of Savar Rana Plaza collapse, the Housing and Public Works Ministry has issued a directive for forming district-level committees, led by deputy commissioners (DCs), following the recommendation of the Cabinet. The ministry has a plan to form the upazila-level committees led by upazila nirbahi officers (UNOs), and nobody will be able to build a house over seven-storey one without the permission of the district committees.
But our confidence erodes when Housing and Public Works Minister Mosharraf Hossain says, "Actually, I've no jurisdiction on housing or building construction affairs at rural level. I've no knowledge about the monitoring there."
Experts feel that the local government should keep watch so that no one can construct buildings using agricultural lands and ignoring rules. The minister, however, says the problems might be solved by enlarging the jurisdiction of Dhaka, Rajshahi and Chittagong development authorities to monitor the activities across the country besides formulating a policy in this regard.
The problem is that as a small country, our villages have got large cities and towns around them. With the country's growing population, these large cities and towns keep on imposing particular demands on the surrounding villages. Apart from its needs for building materials, waste disposal and recreation, city dwellers need space for water supply and communications.
Bangladesh is now set to take the heat of development, no matter how rich the country is with natural resources. Therefore, far-reaching changes are in progress. The process the country's middle class has started to upgrade their lifestyle with building new houses on arable lands will take us to the hell unless the government comes up with a concrete rural housing policy.
I would like recall a poet of the 70s telling us that 'Bangladesh is, in fact, a big village, a growing village endowed with huge natural resources?it's a beautiful country because of its nature and natural resources. But unfortunately, this 'big village' is now heading towards destruction due to unplanned development activities. We should not forget that rural Bangladesh thrives on nature, trees, greeneries, ponds, waters bodies and its agricultural growth. We should not destroy our 'Beautiful Big Village' with our ruthless onslaughts.
Mahfuzur Rahman is a senior journalist







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