On September 6, Prime Minister Tarique Rahman convened a review meeting at the Secretariat on pollution control across the Buriganga, Turag, Dhaleshwari, Balu, and Shitalakhya.
He told the room that citizens should not simply wait for government orders but must act out of personal responsibility to protect these rivers.
It is the right sentiment and the right rivers. But responsibility cannot be the answer to a problem this paper's own reporting has already quantified.
Five days earlier, Dhaka Tribune published the findings of a BIWTA survey that should be sitting on every desk at that review meeting: 424 identified discharge points pour roughly 330 tons of waste into the Buriganga, Turag, Balu, and Shitalakhya every single day.
Industry accounts for nearly 60% of it. Of the 424 outlets, 244 trace back to private factories and industrial units.
That is not a diffuse crisis of collective habit. It is a mapped, countable, addressable set of pipes.
And that is precisely why the directive-and-appeal approach that dominated Monday's meeting will not move the number.
For two decades, Dhaka has treated industrial river pollution as a law-and-order problem: raids, fines, and closure notices. The BIWTA survey shows what that approach has produced -- a system still discharging at full volume, just better documented.
The reason is structural, not a failure of will. More than 30,000 industrial units -- dyeing, washing, tanning, textile finishing, chemicals -- sit across Hazaribagh, Tejgaon, Shyampur, Gazipur, Narayanganj, Keraniganj, and Savar, most of them small and medium enterprises operating as subcontractors on margins of 5-10%.
A functioning effluent treatment plant for a mid-sized dyeing unit costs $150,000 to $400,000 to build, plus steep monthly costs for power, chemicals, and skilled operators.
For an owner at that margin, bypassing the ETP is not defiance. It is how the business survives the season.
The government is not positioned to police its way past that arithmetic. Jurisdiction over these rivers is split across the Department of Environment, RAJUK, Dhaka WASA, BIWTA, the city corporations, and the Ministry of Industries -- a structure in which everyone has a mandate and no one has full accountability.
The BIWTA survey itself illustrates the fragmentation: 66 WASA drains feeding directly into the Buriganga and Turag, 21 outlets under Dhaka South, 16 under Dhaka North, 37 under Narayanganj, plus union parishad drains scattered across Kutubpur, Zinjira, Kalindi, and Shakta.
Each belongs to a different authority. None of them, alone, can close the river's pollution loop. Add an informal economy of unregistered subcontracting units invisible to any inspector, and the familiar cycle repeats: Drive announced, fines issued, and factories shuttered for a week, then quietly reopened.
This is why the PM's call for "collective effort" needs to be pointed at the state's own machinery before it is pointed at citizens.
Three shifts would matter more than another enforcement drive.
First, stop asking 30,000 individual units to each build a compliant ETP; no industrial economy has cleaned its rivers that way.
The proven model is the common effluent treatment plant (CETP), and Bangladesh already has the cautionary tale it needs: The Savar Tannery Estate's CETP was built, then operated poorly.
The lesson is not that CETPs fail -- it is that the government must treat operation, not just construction, as its job, ideally by contracting professional operators under performance-based, transparently-monitored agreements.
Second, make compliance financially possible before demanding it. Bangladesh Bank's green refinance schemes rarely reach the SMEs that most need them.
A targeted package -- low-interest loans for ETP and CETP connections, duty waivers on treatment machinery, a phased subsidy covering 40–60% of CETP connection costs for the first three years, and a tariff structure that charges pre-treating factories less -- would convert compliance from a cost worth evading into infrastructure worth using.
Third, pair regulation with capacity-building: ETP design clinics with BUET, BGMEA, and BKMEA; certified training for operators; a simplified online clearance process; and public, river-zone-wise disclosure of compliance data, so that export buyers already sensitive to green standards do enforcement the state cannot.
None of this excuses the factories dumping into the Buriganga today. The polluter-pays principle should stand. But paying assumes a service exists to pay for, and in most of these clusters, it does not.
Monday's meeting reviewed activities "already undertaken." The BIWTA survey is the evidence of where those activities have gotten us: A fully mapped, still-flowing 330 tons a day.
The rivers do not need another appeal to conscience. They need the ministries in that Secretariat room to build the CETPs, unlock the financing, and coordinate the jurisdiction they already share on paper.
The PM is right that people should not wait for directives. The state should not wait either -- it now has the map.
Ahad Chowdhury, PhD, is a geologist and environmental scientist.
