Urban areas get 70pc of govt water supply fund
Urban areas receive 70 percent of all the government allocation for water supply and sanitation, said WaterAid country representative Dr Mohammed Khairul Islam at a project launch in the capital yesterday.
Dhaka receives the biggest share, he added.
This is despite the fact that only 28 percent of the total population in Bangladesh live in urban areas, according to Unicef. Dhaka hosts 1.5 crore of the total population of 16 crore, says Power and Participation Research Centre.
The biggest losers among the rural areas include hard-to-reach areas like char lands, haor areas, coastal areas, tea-gardens and the Chittagong Hill Tracts, experts told the programme in the NGO Forum for Public Health office.
A research of the NGO Forum reveals the per capita allocation from the water supply and sanitation budget for chars and the CHT is only Tk 11 and Tk 22 respectively. In contrast, Dhaka city dwellers receive Tk 900 per head.
Nurul Islam Khan, additional chief engineer of the Department of Public Health Engineering, recognised that they failed the hard-to-reach areas. "Our water supply projects do not achieve sustainability in char areas because most of the population are temporary inhabitants. Similarly, we cannot set up deep tubewells in hilly regions because there is no groundwater source. Haor areas are excluded because the households are widely dispersed and those areas are sparsely populated," he said.
Experts said thus these regions suffered water pollution, arsenic contamination, sinking water tables, increasing salinity and faecal contamination.
The project, "Enhancing Governance and Capacity of Service Providers and Civil Society in Water Supply and Sanitation Sector", is geared towards safe water supply and sanitation development in hard-to-reach areas.
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