Mustafizur Rahman
Shortage of water, which is gradually becoming acute in the capital with the summer setting in, may trigger demonstrations by city-dwellers, fear Members of Parliament.
The city’s lawmakers expressed their concern at a meeting with the LGRD and cooperatives minister, Syed Ashraful Islam, at the secretariat on Wednesday.
They demanded immediate solution of the water shortage problem by setting up more pumps and generators in the crisis-ridden Mirpur, Sutrapur, Jatrabari and Malibagh areas. But the authorities saw no such remedy to the problem as they attributed the crisis to power outages, depletion of the ground-water level and increasing demand.
The meeting decided to involve the local MPs in mitigating the water crisis in the capital through better coordination between the various authorities concerned.
‘An official gazette notification defining the role of Members of Parliament in addressing the water crisis will be issued within a week,’ said Ashraful Islam while presiding over the meeting.
He said the MPs knew more about the problems the local people were facing and they could play an important role in tackling them.
The minister added that a coordination meeting of the authorities concerned would be held within fifteen days to address the crisis.
Mostafa Jalal Mohiuddin, lawmaker from the Dhaka-7 constituency, said that the water supplied by the Dhaka Water and Sewerage Authority was malodorous as the sewerage lines and water supply pipes were very close to each other.
He said that shortage of water, gas and power was already acute in Old Dhaka and warned that the situation might be aggravated further if the problems were not tackled now.
‘We fear that the water crisis might trigger demonstrations across the city as it has already caused commotion among the people in some parts of the city including Senpara in Mirpur,’ Kamal Ahmed Majumdar, lawmaker from the Dhaka-15 constituency, told the meeting.
AKM Rahmatullah from the Dhaka-10 constituency said the government figure, showing average shortage of only 16 crore litres of water daily, was inaccurate as the authorities had not calculated the demand being added daily against the average supply of 194 crore litres.
State minister for local government, rural development and cooperatives Jahangir Kabir Nanok, top officials of the ministry and the authorities concerned, among others, spoke at the meeting.
Dhaka WASA’s managing director, Raihanul Abedin, said that excessive use of chemicals for treating the highly polluted water of the rivers Buriganga and Sitalakhhya had made the water smell bad.
He also attributed the shortage of water to frequent power outages and inadequate quantity of generators.
‘We have generators at 233 pump stations out of 505 on a permanent basis, besides 41 mobile generators for emergency use. We are going to buy another 200 generators to improve the situation,’ said WASA’s managing director, adding that the government should consider increasing the price of water as the cost of power generation was rising.
He said the government had taken up a $200 million project to replace the old and leaky water pipes in the city.
Courtesy of www.newagebd.com
