First the Buriganga, then the Dhaleshwari

We welcome the instruction of the parliamentary standing committee on the environment ministry to take necessary measures to shut down the Savar Tannery Industrial Estate for its failure to comply with the environment standards. Rejecting the tannery estate's response to a show cause served to it by the Department of Environment (DoE) in December last year—in which the former laid out some ill-conceived plans to stop the environment pollution—the committee also decided that the tannery industry will remain shut until it takes measures to treat all kinds of wastes generated.

While this decision will no doubt have a devastating impact on the tannery industry, we feel we have reached a point of no-return. For over a decade, the industry has been operating without a fully functional central effluent treatment plant (CETP), which means it has been dumping over 15,000 cubic metres of untreated liquid waste into the Dhaleshwari river every day. The estate has no facility to treat solid wastes, including heavy metals and chromium, either. The river, which was once the lifeline of fisherfolk and other communities in the area, has lost its soul and its surrounding areas have become uninhabitable due to the foul stench and deadly contamination of its water. 

We have been hearing about the decision to shut down the estate for more than nine months now—the same parliamentary body recommended shutting down the estate last August, a directive which itself came more than three months after the initial recommendation to shut it down. How many more bureaucratic loopholes do we have to go through before the recommendation is actually implemented? We've already wasted enough time dragging our foot through the dark, hazardous water of the Dhaleshwari—do we want to kill off the river altogether?

Shutting down the industry is a necessary measure that has come too late in the day anyway. But the government, particularly the DoE, must answer for why the industry was moved from Hazaribagh to Savar before the CETP was operational. Why could the CETP not be completed in more than a decade, even after 500 crores was spent on it? How could the estate have been allowed to run without an environmental clearance for so long? There is no end to the questions, but we are yet to receive any convincing answers from the authorities about their own complicity in the whole fiasco. With so much money wasted, the Dhaleshwari wrecked, people's lives and livelihoods destroyed, have we learnt anything at all from our mistakes or will we continue to mindlessly tread down the path of unplanned development?