Stop dumping sewage into Buriganga

The parliamentary standing committee on LGRD ministry yesterday asked Dhaka Water Supply and Sewerage Authority (Wasa) to immediately stop dumping sewage into the river Buriganga, which is already biologically dead due to pollution.
The parliamentary body directed Wasa to jointly work with Dhaka City Corporation (DCC) and other authorities concerned to rescue the canals in and around the city.
The committee also asked the Local Government and Rural Development (LGRD) ministry to form a single prototype authority, which will ensure that residential buildings are not erected desultorily diminishing cultivable land. One has to obtain permission from the authority before constructing a residence building anywhere in the country.
LGRD Minister Syed Ashraful Islam, a member of the committee, attended the two-hour long meeting and agreed with the proposals.
"We have strongly asked Wasa to devise alternative arrangement for discharging sewage instead of into Buriganga to bring it back to life," Md Rahmat Ali, chairman of the standing committee, told reporters after the meeting held at the parliament building.
"The meeting asked the Wasa officials to consult with experts to ascertain the alternative way of dumping sewage," he said.
"We said that Wasa might increase its capacity of treating human waste. But whatever the method would be, we have asked them to block all the sewerage lines to the Buriganga, said Rahmat Ali, a ruling party lawmaker.
The condition of the Buriganga, the lifeline of the city, is so miserable at present that no organism survives in its stinky thick black liquid.
Study shows that each day about 900 cubic metres of untreated domestic and industrial waste is discharged into the Buriganga-Turag system and Wasa has only one sewage treatment plant at Pagla with a capacity of 0.12 million cubic metres per day, which is only 10 percent of total disposal.
The parliamentary watchdog also asked Wasa to prepare a master plan for the city's drainage and water supply system in coordination with Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakkha (Rajuk), which is preparing a detailed area plan of the city.
It also asked the LGRD ministry to bring all the Pourashavas under a master plan and implement all the development activities.