The culprits must be awarded severe penalties

Although incidences of hill cutting are now a common phenomenon, the way a contractor has gone about, in a very methodical and clandestine manner, to raze an area of nearly 100,000 square metres of hills to serve its own purpose, has added a new dimension to the issue. The said construction firm was awarded the job of building a 6-km road on the Chittagong-Dhaka highway in Salimpur of Sitakunda Upazila by the Chittagong Development Authority (CDA) in 2012. That they had ill motives in what they were doing, which was to grab the land, since cutting the hill was not a part of the project, is betrayed by the fact that the company had walled off the area to keep their illegal activities from the public eye. And they have the cheek to claim now that there was no hill at all to start with. One has heard of a Bengali proverb which, loosely translated, means stealing a pond. What we have here is people stealing a hill, and a pretty large one at that.

There are a few questions in respect to this matter that boggles the mind. The contract was awarded in 2012, and reportedly the hill cutting had been going on for several years. Why is it that the Department of Environment (DoE) inspected the area only this year, after the hill had already been demolished to make room for the construction materials, and that too only after the matter was made public through media reports? Can we ask, where was the CDA, whose job it was to ensure that the plan was strictly adhered to? Where was the DoE and indeed the Forest Department, all these years? Would it be a misplaced inference that there was an unholy nexus between the contractor and a few in the concerned agencies at the local level, who came together in this evil enterprise?

It is unfortunate that our environment is being wantonly destroyed, partly because of a lack of proper oversight and supervision. In some cases, the lax oversight is by design. This can be stopped only when the perpetrators and those public servants who allow these actions to go unnoticed and unpunished are hauled up before the court of law and made an example of.