Flagrant disregard for public interest

Should people suffer because of someone's unlawful act, which has gone unnoticed by the authorities? The case in point is the high-handed attitude of a person who deems it perfectly permissible to withdraw and separate water from a common source, a flowing canal meant for the daily use of ordinary people living along the canal. The culprit in question happens to be a hotel owner; what gives him this I-couldn't-care-less-about-others attitude is the fact that he also happens to be an advisor to the district unit of Awami League in Bandarban.

It is outrageous that the hotel owner would dig a 100-feet deep tube well to extract 12,000 litres of potable water from the canal for his hotel, depriving the nearly seven hundred people in the area. Even the protests of the locals could not make him desist from this illegal act. The local councillor, we understand, is afraid to warn him or report the matter to the police for redress, because this person is very close to the political class of the area and therefore deems himself above the law. This has been going on for a year.

Depriving the people of common resources is illegal, but when the resource involved is water, it is a criminal act. In the Chittagong Hill Tracts, water happens to be a rare commodity. Development work and the tourism boom in the region have wrought irreparable damage to its ecology. In particular, many of the life-sustaining streams have dried up because of such activities.

So not only is this hotel owner depriving the people of water, withdrawing water in this manner is also contributing to depleting water sources, risking the prospect of the canal drying up altogether. Is this what politicians, who claim to represent the people, do to the people? We demand that the local administration takes cognizance of the matter seriously. The hotel owner should be held accountable and the law must be applied regardless of his political clout.