Remove illegal structures, free Buriganga

National taskforce on river recovery yesterday asked Dhaka South City Corporation to evict the illegal occupiers from Buckland embankment along the Buriganga to restore the adjacent road within a week.
Shipping Minister Shahjahan Khan said this after a meeting of the taskforce at the secretariat. He was briefing newsmen on the taskforce's decisions to save rivers from encroachment and pollution.
The road from Shashanghat to Lalbagh is occupied by unauthorised kitchen markets and vendors in the Shyambazar portion of the Buckland dam.
Construction of a central effluent treatment plant (ETP) for tannery industries would be completed within the next one and a half years in Savar, noted the minister, also the chief of the taskforce.
From now on, no industrialist will be considered for awarding the status of commercially important person (CIP) unless he/she sets up a functional ETP in his/her factory, he added.
The industries ministry has so far set up 68 ETPs in 27 BSCIC industrial zones across the country.
The deputy commissioners (DC) concerned have finished setting up most of the boundary pillars along the four rivers in Dhaka. The job remained incomplete at some places due to “contractors' negligence,” mentioned Shahjahan.
The panel decided to save the river Hakar in Jessore, Karnaphuli in Chittagong and Shuvadya and Shyampur canals in the capital from the clutches of encroachers and polluters.
It instructed Dhaka Wasa to take legal action against those who have illegally connected sewage pipes to storm drains, thus causing serious pollution of rivers and canals.
The minister said the Department of Environment has fined river polluting industries Tk 41 crore.
Shipping Secretary Md Abdul Mannan Howlader said the agencies concerned did not implement most of the decisions of the committee.
Environment and Forest Minister Hasan Mahmud, Land Minister Rezaul Karim Hira and Water Resources Minister Ramesh Chandra Sen attended the meeting, among others.
The taskforce in its meeting in February last year had decided to engage mobile courts to try the land grabbers and river polluters with instant fine and imprisonment. But since then, there is hardly any instance of taking such action.