Fixing the city's woes

It is not at all surprising that Dhaka has been ranked among the world's worst cities to live in, second only to war-torn Damascus. The Economist Intelligence Unit's assessment should serve as a damning indictment of the failure of successive governments to make the capital at all liveable and to improve the basic infrastructure of the city.

From the performance of our traffic police leading to heavy traffic congestion, to water-logging caused by poor waste management and city planning, Dhaka's never-ending list of woes has simply grown over the years.

The government must devise a radical and comprehensive plan to fix these. The planning and implementation processes should involve more stakeholders and even opposition parties and civil society members to ensure consistency of planning which we are yet to see.

Naimur Rahman Khan, By e-mail