Chittagong city dwellers are under threat of catching different airborne and waterborne diseases as Chittagong City Corporation (CCC) is struggling to properly manage the huge amount of rubbish the dwellers
The authorities in Chittagong decided to launch a drive demarcate vulnerable spots with red lines and move the people from such spots by dismantling their houses on the hill slopes. The drive is aimed at averting further landslides, officials said. Fears for fresh landslides after Monday's incident in which 11 slum dwellers were killed at Motijharna at Lalkhan Bazar prompted the authorities to make the decision at a meeting with the commerce and education adviser, Hossain Zillur Rahman, on Tuesday.
The government initiated the process to mark hillsides and valleys, where landslides are possible, as "Red Zones", evacuate people living in those areas and bring those areas under afforestation. The move comes a day after 11 people died in a mudslide at Matirjharna in Chittagong city. Commerce and Education Adviser Zillur Rahman gave the necessary directives to authorities concerned in this regard during a meeting in Chittagong yesterday. The meeting was held at the local circuit house following Monday's rain-induced mudslide that killed 11 people.
THE death of eleven people in a landslide in Chittagong raises all our old concerns about the precarious way lives are lived in this country. The fact that huge chunks of mud from a hill descended on fourteen homes, part of a slum, and took the lives of two families would be called by fatalists as an act of nature against which people have hardly any defence. But in reality this was courted, thanks to fiddling with nature and imprudent choice of site for habitation with commercial interests thrown in.
The authorities concerned have done little to translate into reality the recommendations made by the probe bodies last year after the catastrophic landslide in Chittagong city that killed 126 people, said sources. Residents blamed the government for not taking effective steps to protect the port city from landslide tragedies. Consequently another landslide tragedy, the latest of its kind, hit the city's Motijarna slum in Lalkhan Bazaar on Monday, killing 11 sleeping residents, they said.
A rain-induced mudslide at Matijharna in Chittagong city early yesterday left 11 people, almost all of two families, dead and two injured. The mudslide destroyed 14 houses of a slum built on a hillside from which the government was relocating families apprehending the danger.
The time is appropriate for the CTG, NGOs, local communities and non-profit organisations in Bangladesh to collaborate more effectively and start working together towards a "cleaner Dhaka city," or to at least protect wetlands in Dhaka from the pressure of development to ensure desirable biodiversity. This writer was quite alarmed during a recent phone conversation with a relative, who was visiting Boston. It was alarming because my relative said that there were hardly any wetlands in Bangladesh that may be considered active.
In the heels of the predatory nature of deforestation and environmental degradation, urban as well as rural afforestation programmes have assumed paramount significance in Bangladesh in line with the neighbouring South Asian nations. Although there has been a prolific growth of literature on environment in general and forestry in particular, research on urban forestry in Bangladesh has been strikingly limited.
Excavation of few canals and removal of already identified blockages in the drainage system can save the port city from waterlogging and inundation, said the speakers at a roundtable yesterday. The roundtable titled 'Drainage: A Menace for Chittagong' was organised by The Daily Star Chittagong Bureau Office at its conference room in the afternoon. It was the first of a series of roundtable that The Daily Star Chittagong Office will hold on different development issues of the port city.
It came as a shocking reality to us at the end of our five-day trip to the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) that this vast area hardly supports any wildlife any more. The systematic destruction of the forests had been so severe that many of the animals that used to reside here and nowhere else have disappeared. Dr Reza Khan who led us to this awakening trip to the hills searched every nook and corner of the forests for sightings of such great animals and birds like the great hornbill, pied hornbill, dollar bird, mathura, great horned owl, fairy blue bird or holook gibbon.
Police seized 60 maunds of adulterated ghee and vegetable oils from a factory near Chittagong University (CU) in the early hours of yesterday. They also arrested five people in this connection. The arrestees were identified as Akash, Sagar and Vishnu of Tangail, Shahid of Mymensingh and Rahim of Bhola. Sources said Hathazari police unearthed the factory housed in a thatched structure at CU Gate No 1 beside Chittagong-Hathazari Road. In a drive that started at around 2:30am, they seized 13 drums of adulterated ghee and vegetable oils and 7 drums of palm oils from the factory.
