Why is Bhabadaha still waterlogged?

It is hard to believe that the residents of Bhabadaha region in the south of Bangladesh—consisting of around 52 beels in Jashore Sadar, Abhaynagar, Monirampur, and Keshabpur upazilas of Jashore, and Dumuria upazila of Khulna—have been suffering due to waterlogging for several years now. Reportedly, over one million people of the area have to face waterlogging for seven to eight months of the year, while for a significant portion of the people, this problem persists all year round. According to a report by this daily on January 16, around 120 villages in Jashore and Khulna are still submerged in water this winter. Around 150,000 residents of these villages are going through unbearable suffering, because it is not only their croplands that are inundated, but their homesteads are also under knee-to-waist deep water.

Our correspondent recently visited some of these villages and found that only the roads in those villages were above water. Villagers are going through severe financial hardship as they cannot cultivate in their lands due to the waterlogging. While many of them have turned to fish farming, that is not as economically rewarding as cultivating crops. 

Unfortunately, the various projects undertaken by the Bangladesh Water Development Board (WDB) to solve this problem have not yielded much result. Over the years, they have implemented a number of coastal embankment projects to stop tidal water from entering the villages, as well as various other projects to pump the water out from the region, but with little effect. According to experts and villagers, these projects are not well-thought-out, and thus are unlikely to solve the issue. They suggest that the tidal river management (TRM) approach is a more practical method that should be used here. In this method, an embankment is built around a beel, leaving two cut-points for water to enter and recede from there. When the water recedes during low tide, it takes the sediment deposited on the riverbed in a process of natural excavation. Thus, this method keeps the depth of the rivers and beels intact.

According to the Centre for Environment and Geographical Information Services (CEGIS), TRM is less expensive, technically feasible and also environmentally friendly. According to the organisation, there was less waterlogging in the Bhabadaha area before 2012 because of the implementation of the TRM. People in the affected areas also want this approach to be implemented by the WDB to save them from the perennial waterlogging. The question is, what is stopping the WDB from taking this approach?

We urge the authorities concerned to take expert suggestions on the issue into consideration as well as listen to the people of the region, and take pragmatic approaches to solve the problem, thereby saving over a million people in the region from such unnecessary sufferings.