The Barisal City Corporation authorities on Wednesday started drives to recover the navigability of the canals flowing in the city to save it from water-stagnation.
Acting mayor Altaf Mahmud Shikdar, along with newly elected mayor Ahsan Habib Kamal and local lawmaker Mojibor Rahman Sarwar, inaugurated the programme to recover the navigability of the Rayer canal in the city.
Barisal city once had different types of water bodies like canals, ponds and the River Kirtankhola was more than four kilometers wide around fifty years back, the speakers said, addressing the programme.
Rampant filling and grabbing of the water bodies had limited the number of water bodies to four canals, 40 ponds and reduced the Kirtankhola to less than one kilometer in width in about 45 square kilometre of Barisal city; and the rest of the water bodies were about to be extinct or rapidly dying.
The six-kilometre Rayer canal was excavated from Lakutia Zamindar Bari in mid-British period and joined to Jail Khal in Natun Bazaar area of the city.
However, unplanned and inoperative sluice gates, small cross-dams, bridges, culverts, pisciculture, construction of houses and shops over the Rayer Khal had turned it into a dead drain, they said.
The city dwellers as well as the people who were dependent on Rayer canal would be benefited by this step to recover the navigability of the canal, they hoped.
-With New Age input
