They were, in fact, lucky to be alive for so many years and, hence, had to pay for this profligacy. And that is exactly what they did. They paid with their lives for having been born in a country where human life is cheap.

What happens when people die by the dozen in unusual circumstances? They turn into statistical figures and get buried in a mass grave.

But what happens when a close relation of a politician or a bureaucrat or a businessman dies? He or she gets a decent burial in a decent place, with all the pomp and grandeur that money and influence can get.

Therefore, what is the point in shedding crocodile tears for those people in Chittagong who were no kith or kin of ours?

Compassion for fellow humans? If compassion was really in circulation then none of those hills would have been cut in the first place. Remember how many stories with relevant photographs and expert opinions about the possible impact of hill cutting were printed in national newspapers and weeklies?

The media kept printing those over and over again during the last fifteen years. Environmentalists kept shouting slogans during the last fifteen years. Did anyone read those stories? Did anyone hear those slogans?

Let us ask the mighty mayor of Chittagong, Mr. Mohiuddin Chowdhury, who has been in power for many, many years, and during whose tenure most of the hills have been leveled to the ground.

Did you, Mr. Mayor, read those stories and care to ponder a while on what could result from such an atrocity on nature? Did you exert your influence to stop the hill cutters and their political allies (some belonging to your own party), the way you always exerted influence to keep control over the Chittagong Port?

Today, even in a jail hospital, you must be reading about the tragic deaths of those hapless, landless people who had taken shelter under some of those hills. Do you feel any compassion for them? You should not, because you did nothing when there was time to do plenty.

You, as the mayor, perhaps gave unwritten permission, gave the nod of your head, when unscrupulous contractors whispered in your ears about the profit all of you would make by cutting down those hills.

Mr. Mayor, you are a man from Chittagong, a true son of the soil, and yet you are a party to the destruction of the pristine beauty of your own city. How strange! How shameful! You have deformed the once majestic port city, where people from all over the country used to go to enjoy the scenic beauty, especially the hills.

How much money, Mr. Mayor, did you and your cronies make by selling the soil from those hills? Have you become rich enough? Is your greed satiated? Are you sorry that you did not get the opportunity to finish off the rest of the hills?

But we feel sorry for you and your political cousins belonging to other parties. Sorry for the kind of politicians that you all proved to have been. The more that is revealed about you people, the more we feel our appetite going. We had trusted you and you deceived us, you deceived the entire nation.

Water-logging in Dhaka city
The chief engineer of a powerful agency said that the entire storm sewer system of Dhaka city has to be redesigned if we want to get rid of the water-logging problem.

Well, whether or not the new design would solve the problem is another issue. What is the most interesting issue here is -- he is talking about, let's take a hypothetical figure, a four-thousand-crore-Taka project. What a lovely thought!

The wise engineer has, perhaps, already done the calculation. Out of the four thousand crore, three thousand five hundred crore would be distributed amongst the minister and state minister of the relevant ministry, parliamentary committee members, ministry big brasses, ministry small brasses, DCC top cats, DCC small cats, and the engineers involved in the project.

The remaining five hundred crore would be given to a reliable contractor who would make three hundred crore for himself from there, and the small fries would get the rest of the money. What about the project?

Well, you would witness some digging and cutting of the roads for one year after a grand opening ceremony, and then, one day, you will forget about it.

The contractor's men would pack up and go home, and forget about you as well. Dear readers, this is what has been happening for decades in this country, in the name of development.

Now, as citizens of this country, and after having paid our taxes from our genuine meager incomes, shall we ask all the past mighty mayors and the present mighty mayor, past chief engineers and present chief engineer, and all the past ministers -- why did you keep pretending, and telling us lies for the last fifteen years about working on a modern storm sewer system that would take care of the water logging problem in the city?

If you had thought that the present design was faulty, then why did you spend thousands of crores of taka on it? If you think that a new design is needed, then what guarantee is there that you will not take us for a ride again?

The city-fathers had been telling us one story after another when it came to solving some age-old problems of the metropolis. Though the problems never got solved, yet, behind our backs they have been giving away contracts to their kin to do some superficial repair works. And this is how they have been eating up hundreds of crores of taka from the yearly DCC budget.

We feel that the present government must investigate this great theft case, and make the past ministers, state ministers, engineers, mayors, bureaucrats and businessmen pay back the money they have stolen from the various projects to make Dhaka a capital worth the name. Even if they have to sell their numerous houses in the city they must pay for the crime.

Shahnoor Wahid is a Senior Assistant Editor of The Daily Star.