Terming riverbank erosion a ‘silent cancer’ for the country, Water Resources Minister Anisul Islam Mahmud yesterday said erosion was more devastating than cyclone or flood as it claimed everything what people possess.
“If a cyclone or a flood hits people, they have the chance to return to normal life. If people once become migrant losing their belongings due to riverbank erosion, they are forced out of society. And it is quite impossible to return to normal life,” he said.
The Water Resources Minister was addressing the launching ceremony of a book ‘People of Many Rivers: Tales from the Riverbanks’ orgainsed by ActionAid Bangladesh at a city hotel.
Speaking as the chief guest, Anisul Islam said the government taken a mega project involving about US$ 1.7 billion to build an embankment on the right bank of the Brahmaputra River to protect lands and property of local people from erosion.
He said resettlement villages or cluster villages will be built for rehabilitating the affected people before launching the embankment project as a huge number of people will be displaced from the riverbank in the project area.
Once the project is implemented, the people living along the riverbank will be benefited from it, the minister added.
Saying that the construction of riverbank is very expensive, the Water Resources Minister said at least Tk1 lakh is needed to build one metre of embankment. “Now we will have to think whether we will allow erosion and flood to take place in the country.”
Indian water expert Dr Sanjoy Hazarika said Brahmaputra, Ganges and Meghna are not the rivers of a single country but the rivers of Asia, which have a plenty of natural resources.
About the people’s dependence on rivers, he said: “We will survive if the rivers remain alive.”
Netherlands Ambassador in Dhaka Leoni Margaretha Cuelenaere and Executive Director for Regional Centre for Strategic Studies, Colombo, and Dhaka University teacher Dr Imtiaz Ahmed also spoke at the programme moderated by ActionAid Country Director Bangladesh Farah Kabir.
The book ‘People of Many Rivers: Tales from the Riverbanks’ narrates how the free flow of the South Asian rivers are affected by large-scale irrigation and hydropower development projects intensifying river erosion, displacement, changes in culture and ritual, loss of livelihood and economic opportunities.
The book, edited by Dr Imtiaz Ahmed, a professor of International Relations at Dhaka University, was jointly published by ActionAid Bangladesh and University Press Ltd.