The recent fire at Korail, which burned down at least 500 houses, brings to light the fact that Bangladesh has a slum problem.
Not only was this the second fire at Korail this year, made worse by an incompetent fire brigade, unsafe housing has aggravated the situation further.
Here lies the root of the problem.
Slums in Dhaka are inhabitable. With dilapidated buildings, lack of proper sanitation and waste management, and extremely unhygienic conditions, slums like Korail are places no one should have to live in.
The solution to this problem is low-income public housing.
These people continue to suffer despite repeated incidents such as these. The government needs to come forward and commit to proper public housing that caters to the needs of the urban poor.
It is a crying shame that this solution has not yet been considered seriously.
The Korail slum-dwellers continue to be victims to the city’s growing need for urbanisation and development. The Gulshan-Banani lake, which provided cheap commutes for Korail’s inhabitants via rafts, has already been declared out of bounds by the authorities.
What use is growth when the most marginalised sections of our society continue to suffer?
The government’s plans to build a high-tech IT village in the area is a good opportunity for them to both develop its plan, and provide Korail’s inhabitants with affordable housing. If half of the land was used to build an IT park, a developer could easily build affordable housing for the poor in the other half.
Multi-storied complexes, as opposed to the general one-storied nature of slums, can house more people on less land, and are therefore the efficient solution.
The tragedy is that solutions exist, and yet they have been routinely ignored. It is high time the government paid heed to the struggle of Dhaka’s slum-dwellers and put this solution forward in practice.
