Barun Roy: Reinventing mobility

Bangladesh is being forced to transform from a land of river-based transportation into one of highways

As Bangladesh prepares to call international tenders for the construction of a 6.15-km road-and-rail bridge across the Padma, raising hopes for a major economic boost to its underdeveloped south-western districts, worries about the river’s future, quite naturally, have surfaced once again. But the present mood in the country, it seemed to me on a recent trip, isn’t one of helpless resignation. The proposed bridge is one more proof that the dynamics of life is changing for a people whose mobility is no longer necessarily bound by the state of its rivers.

The Padma is dying for sure, as are at least 187 other Bangladeshi rivers. The visual evidence is abundant. On way from Dhaka to a resort on the banks of the Madhumati in south-western Narail district, as we passed the flat landscape around Munshiganj, inhabited by occasional small villages and fields of crops, the driver said all that land was once part of the mighty river. It was hard to believe.

 

At Mawa, we had to take a car ferry that meandered for two and a half hours through a complex maze of channels before dropping us off on the other side. The journey was enjoyable. The Padma was still impressively vast and at places looked like a veritable sea. But every now and then, the barge passed by enormous sandbars that stretched for miles and stood a clean five or six feet above the water’s surface. They were to the right and they were to the left, and after a while I stopped counting. Some were still being formed, ready to raise their barren humps anytime through the water.

According to some estimates, Bangladesh’s rivers together carry some 3.8 billion tons of silt every year, and 87 per cent of these rivers are peppered with sandbars, submerged or raised. Out of 24,000 km of rivers, streams, and canals the country has, only about 5,968 km are navigable during the monsoon and only 3,865 km during the dry season.

Bangladesh blames India squarely for its plight. Bangladesh is at the lower reaches of no fewer than 54 rivers that the two countries commonly share. Dhaka says the sharing is unequal and upstream dams on the Indian stretches have not only left the country parched during the dry season but have also aggravated flooding during the rains. The Farakka barrage in West Bengal, which controls the flow of Ganga waters into the Padma, is perceived as a death trap.

But it’s becoming apparent to many that the situation has gone beyond the stage of give and take and is now almost irretrievable. India’s use of the Ganga and other shared rivers may have been unfair and arguably reckless, but it’s a fait accompli that can no more be reversed.

India, of course, has offered to help in whatever other ways it can to alleviate the crisis for Bangladesh, like extensive dredging of riverbeds. But dredging can only help in part, like freeing up a channel here or opening up a “runway” for fish there, but it can no longer restore the rivers to their pristine state of navigability. The problem of silting is simply too big.

Slowly, but inevitably, Bangladesh is being forced to transform from a land of river-based transportation into one of cars and highways. One by one, the rivers are being bridged and the obstacles are falling away. There’s the Jamuna Bridge (also called Bangabandhu Bridge) that connects the eastern parts of the country with those to its northwest, eliminating traffic jams at ferry ghats that could often last for days. The Bhairab Bridge takes the Dhaka-Sylhet highway straight across the Meghna. The Meghna-Gomti double bridges make travel to Comilla and Chittagong a breeze. Soon, the Padma bridge will integrate the underdeveloped south-western regions of the country with its eastern parts and help revive the foundering riverport of Mongla, which will have the connectivity to develop as a valuable complement to Chittagong

The proposed 6.15-km., $2.4 billion Padma bridge, between Mawa in Munshiganj and Janjira in Madaripur, will have a four-lane road on its top tier and a broad-gauge railway line below. Work is slated to start next year and finish by 2014.

Thus, one chapter of the legend of Bangladesh, revolving around its 70,000 or so inland water vessels, 11 inland ports, and some 14,000 ferry ghats, is coming to a close while a new culture of long-distance driving, along a growing network of four-lane highways, is opening up to stay. Of course, there will still be boatmen on the Padma and the Meghna and the Dhaleswari, like there still are rickshaws in Dhaka, and people will still love to chug along on slow cruises, but Bangladeshis are certainly undergoing a change of mindset, trying to leave their past behind, and coming to a new understanding of their future.

rbarun@gmail.com