The politics and pollution of our rivers

Humanity's effort to organise society while surrounded by moving water led to the creation of institutions, which tied people together in mutual dependence in their attempt to deal with the environment. Water is the ultimate public good, as it is a moving, formless substance that defies private ownership – being hard to contain and requiring collective management.

If we look back at the transformation of the Bengal delta into a human habitat, it is nothing but the development of a water management system and adaptation to floods and the climate. The identity of "Bangalee" or "Bongo" is tied to Bengal's history of culture, economy, and communication system that developed with the ecological management of water.

The power of the modern state and the force of industrial capitalism have radically transformed our landscape. Its success has been so complete that it has made society's relationship with water invisible. Bangladesh's political commitments and existing development paradigm are also the active successors of its colonial legacy of development for the urban elite.

Land use and urban agglomeration have resulted in significant deterioration of natural resources, especially forest and water bodies. The current notion of development in Bangladesh, focusing on quantitative growth-based economy, has led to industrialisation in and around Dhaka, Savar, Gazipur, Narsingdi, Chattogram, and Khulna, originally in an unplanned way.

At first, the locals were amazed to see factories and infrastructures in their localities. Initially, it gave them some employment and trade opportunities. But gradually, farmers, fishermen and others who had been living their lives based on wetlands, forests, and agriculture lost control of their community-managed ecology.

Farmers lost their ecological sovereignty to cultivate crops due to industrial pollution on their land. Fishermen lost their livelihoods because there are no fish and aquatic biodiversity left during the lean season. A recent study by the River and Delta Research Centre (RDRC) shows that along just 66 kilometres of the Turag River, there are more than 33 fishermen villages. Approximately 30,000 families are involuntarily unemployed for six months during the lean season, because the water gets so polluted that no aquatic species can exist in the river. They have been marginalised by the industrial elite, and the fisheries ministry has no data about them. Loss of farmland and floodplains along the river tells of more sad stories.

If we look back at the transformation of the Bengal delta into a human habitat, it is nothing but the development of a water management system and adaptation to floods and the climate. The identity of "Bangalee" or "Bongo" is tied to Bengal's history of culture, economy, and communication system that developed with the ecological management of water.

Bangladesh is a signatory to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). But it will never be able to achieve most of the SDG targets without addressing the mass pollution of its environment, especially water.

Water polluted by industrial and agricultural activities contains many metals (e.g. arsenic, cadmium and mercury) and synthetic organic compounds (e.g. pesticides and polychlorinated biphenyls) that are toxic for people at high concentrations. These pollutants can accumulate in groundwater, contaminate aquifers and cause poisoning. Water with excessive nutrient loading can lead to the eutrophication of water and soil, threatening aquatic biodiversity. Moreover, newly emerging pollutants like pharmaceuticals and personal care products present in water add more to the pollution of our water resources, with unidentified long-term effects on human health and the ecosystem.

Testing the water of 56 rivers gave us some interesting insights into the state of river pollution in the country. For example, in the case of the Buriganga, Turag, Tongi canal and Balu, we found that the biggest polluters are either the Water Supply and Sewerage Authority (Wasa), city corporations or industrial factories. Only a few households dump their waste into the rivers as they do not have any waste management system facilitated by the city corporations. The reality is quite similar for other rivers.

The geolocation of the polluted rivers also highlights how river pollution, from being confined to megacities like Dhaka and Chattogram only two decades ago, has now spread to every town in the country. How did this happen? Is it because of a lack of supervision by the Department of Environment (DoE) and/or other government monitoring inefficiencies? Or is it related to other policy issues?

The government established the National River Conservation Commission (NRCC) about a decade ago. But till date, it has not been able to restore a single river.

While working on our above-mentioned study, we found encroachment by local political elites to be one of the biggest threats to our rivers. Yet, our government officials and agencies are reluctant to take any action against them. Local journalists lack the freedom to write about this encroachment. Local leaders "sell" the rivers to the fishermen. Only the highest bidder gets to fish in a particular portion of the water bodies – other, marginalised fishermen are not allowed to fish there.

Our study also found that new projects – economic processing zones (EPZs), power plants, etc – were mainly being developed on the riverbanks. These projects initially exclude riverine communities and river-dependent communities. Later, other low-income communities dependent on farmland are excluded from this so-called development. Because the control of water and natural resources is no longer in the hands of the people, their use is eventually meant to benefit a particular class.

As we can see from this, the control of water is ultimately essential for political power. In essence, whoever controls the water is, at a fundamental level, in control of everything. It is, therefore, not surprising that issues about the ownership, access and control of water create more conflicts around the world than just about anything else.

And because water is so central to every level of human well-being, a society's arrangements of "who owns the water" provide precise reflections of both its internal and external political relations. In this sense, the ownership and control of water can be seen as fundamental to democracy, and populations who have lost direct representational control over their most essential resource have, in effect, lost their political power to unelected and often unaccountable elites.

Mohammad Azaz is chairman of the River and Delta Research Centre (RDRC).