Every year, Bangladesh waits for the monsoon with a curious mixture of hope and apprehension. Farmers pray for rain, city dwellers pray that it does not rain too much, and public authorities pray that the old weaknesses of urban infrastructure remain hidden for another season.
This year, the rain refused to cooperate with those hopes. Instead, it exposed the true condition of Bangladesh's largest cities with startling honesty.
Streets became rivers, homes became islands, and ordinary routines dissolved into hours of uncertainty as waist-deep water swallowed neighbourhoods across Dhaka and Chittagong. The floods did not simply interrupt urban life. They revealed how fragile that life has become.
Whenever cities become submerged, the public conversation quickly settles into familiar patterns. Heavy rainfall is blamed. Climate change is invoked. Plastic waste is identified as the principal villain. Municipal agencies promise stronger action, while citizens direct their anger toward government institutions.
Within weeks, the water disappears, daily life resumes, and the cycle of forgetfulness begins again. The following year, the same explanations are repeated almost word for word.
The real tragedy is not that our cities experience waterlogging every monsoon. It is that we continue treating it as an annual inconvenience rather than as evidence of a steadily deteriorating urban ecosystem.
Waterlogging is often described as a drainage problem. In reality, it is a governance problem disguised as an engineering problem. Drains do not suddenly lose their ability to carry water. They gradually become incapable because every component of urban management fails simultaneously.
Canals disappear beneath illegal construction. Wetlands are sacrificed for real estate projects. Drainage channels remain clogged with waste. Maintenance is delayed until emergencies become impossible to ignore. Different public agencies work in isolation despite managing systems that are physically interconnected. Rain merely exposes these accumulated failures.
The discussion surrounding polythene illustrates the danger of searching for a convenient explanation. There is little doubt that plastic waste has become one of the greatest environmental threats facing Bangladesh's cities. Non-biodegradable bags, bottles, wrappers and packaging materials choke drains and obstruct the natural movement of water. Municipal workers routinely remove enormous quantities of plastic waste from canals before and after every monsoon. Anyone denying this reality ignores what is visible across almost every urban neighbourhood.
Yet it is equally misleading to suggest that plastic itself is responsible for urban flooding. Plastic has no agency. It reaches drains because an entire system permits it to do so. Waste management remains fragmented. Recycling infrastructure remains inadequate. Public awareness campaigns rarely continue beyond symbolic observances. Illegal dumping carries little social stigma and even less legal consequence. A discarded shopping bag becomes dangerous only because countless institutional failures allow it to accumulate where water should naturally flow.
This distinction matters because it shifts the debate from symptoms to causes. Bangladesh has become remarkably skilled at treating visible consequences while avoiding structural reforms. Drains are cleaned after flooding instead of before it. Canals are excavated only after public outrage reaches the front pages of newspapers. Temporary pumps are installed while long-term planning remains absent. Each intervention addresses immediate pressure without reducing future vulnerability. The result is an endless cycle of emergency management replacing genuine urban governance.
Perhaps the most alarming aspect of the current crisis is that none of these problems emerged unexpectedly. Urban planners have warned for years that Dhaka's natural drainage network was disappearing. Environmentalists repeatedly highlighted the consequences of filling ponds, wetlands and flood retention areas. Satellite images have documented the shrinking of water bodies surrounding the capital. Newspapers have carried countless investigative reports on encroached canals and neglected drains. Bangladesh is not suffering from a shortage of knowledge. It is suffering from an extraordinary failure to translate knowledge into sustained public policy.
That failure reflects a broader weakness in how development itself is imagined. Too often, development is measured through visible construction while invisible ecological systems receive little attention. Elevated expressways, commercial towers and new housing projects become symbols of progress.
Meanwhile, the canals beneath those developments, the wetlands surrounding them and the drainage systems supporting them receive far less political attention because they rarely produce dramatic inauguration ceremonies or attractive photographs. Yet cities ultimately survive not because of what rises above the ground, but because of what continues to function beneath it.
A recent public remark by Tarique Rahman about his lifelong habit of placing used tissues in a dustbin may have appeared insignificant against the scale of Bangladesh's urban flooding. Critics may even dismiss such observations as simplistic when cities are drowning under failed infrastructure.
Yet the comment touches upon an overlooked dimension of environmental governance. Great public systems are ultimately sustained by millions of ordinary private decisions. Civic responsibility begins long before government intervention becomes necessary.
The experience of countries frequently praised for their clean urban environments demonstrates this reality. Japan, Singapore and South Korea certainly possess efficient municipal institutions and strict regulations. However, they also benefit from social norms that discourage littering and encourage respect for shared public spaces.
Citizens generally understand that roads, drains, parks and rivers are collective assets rather than nobody's property. Such attitudes cannot eliminate flooding on their own, but they substantially reduce the pressure placed upon public infrastructure.
Bangladesh faces a more complicated challenge because environmental responsibility has become fragmented between citizens and institutions, with each expecting the other to act first.
Residents blame municipal authorities for blocked drains while continuing to dispose of waste carelessly. Public agencies blame irresponsible citizens while neglecting regular maintenance and enforcement. Developers blame regulatory weaknesses while profiting from environmentally destructive construction. Everyone identifies another party's failure while minimizing their own contribution to the crisis.
Nevertheless, institutional accountability must remain at the centre of the discussion. Citizens cannot restore buried canals or redesign urban drainage networks. They cannot coordinate overlapping jurisdictions among multiple government agencies. Nor can they prevent illegal encroachment upon flood retention areas without effective state intervention.
These responsibilities belong to governments precisely because they require planning, authority and continuity beyond the capacity of individual citizens.
Unfortunately, Bangladesh's urban governance often operates through administrative fragmentation rather than institutional coordination. Roads, drainage, sewerage, electricity, water supply, waste management and urban development frequently fall under different authorities pursuing different priorities. Projects overlap without meaningful consultation. Roads are excavated repeatedly by separate agencies. Drains remain disconnected from wider water management strategies.
During emergencies, responsibility becomes dispersed so widely that accountability almost disappears altogether. Water, unlike bureaucracy, does not recognise administrative boundaries. It simply follows the path of least resistance, exposing every weakness in governance along the way.
Climate change undoubtedly intensifies these challenges. Rising sea levels, increasingly erratic rainfall and more frequent extreme weather events demand greater resilience from urban infrastructure. Bangladesh cannot control global climate trends, but it can control how prepared its cities become. Climate change should encourage stronger planning rather than provide a convenient explanation for every failure. Natural hazards become disasters primarily where governance remains weak.
Ultimately, this year's devastating waterlogging should be understood as more than an environmental or engineering crisis. It represents a crisis of priorities. The flooded streets remind us that development cannot be measured solely by flyovers, elevated expressways or expanding skylines while the ecological systems supporting those achievements quietly disappear beneath concrete.
Sustainable cities depend upon functioning drains as much as impressive buildings, upon protected wetlands as much as modern highways, and upon responsible citizenship as much as ambitious public investment.
HM Nazmul Alam is an academic, journalist, and political analyst based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Currently he teaches at IUBAT.
