BHABADAH'S PLIGHT

BHABADAH'S PLIGHT

Hishttps://www.facebook.com/pinjory.biswas anxiety is shared by thousands of families in the three upazilas known as Bhabadah area, between Jessore and Khulna in southern Bangladesh. The area is crisscrossed by seven main rivers -- the Mukteshwari, Teka, Hari, Sree, Aparbhadra, Harihar and Buribhadra -- and many canals.
Aptly called the “Sorrow of Jessore,” much of Bhabadah remains inundated for months during rain almost every year.
This year, about 600,000 people in 286 villages have been affected in various degrees, according to Bangladesh Water Development Board (BWDB) officials in Jessore.

With a child on her lap, a woman sits outside a shabby makeshift hut beside a road at Betbhita village in Jessore's Abhaynagar. Taking some utensils, a few belongings and cattle, her family started living in the shanty in a miserable condition after their house had gone under waist-deep water following heavy rains. Photo: Rashed Shumon

With all the rivers and canals silted up over the last three decades, the rain waters have nowhere to go now. So they get trapped in these beels, submerging homesteads, farmlands, roads and educational institutions.
When the waterlogging is at its worst, normal life comes to a standstill in these beels spreading over 487 square kilometres. There is hardly any work. Living space becomes so scarce that sometimes a whole family shares a single room with their cattle. Others sell out their domestic animals at nominal prices. Water gets contaminated, causing various skin and water-borne diseases. Fishes die.
Sometimes water snakes, frogs and other poisonous bugs, looking for a dry place, enter their huts, creating panic.
This year, at least 11 people, mostly children, drowned or died from snake bites, media reports said citing government officials.
Angered and shocked, hundreds of Bhabadah people travelled to Noapara, some 10km away, on October 5 to take to the streets, demanding government action. They were met with police action instead, in which some 50 people, including women and elderly campaigners, were injured.
Bhabadah's waterlogging problem began in the early 1980s when all its rivers started drying up, after the construction of costal embankments and sluice gates in the region. The embankments and sluice gates were built to prevent saline water from intruding into the beels. The saline water stopped, and so did the natural flow of currents in the process.

An elderly woman, sitting on a piece of bamboo, doing the dishes in floodwater at Dohor Mashiahati in the upazila. Photo: Rashed Shumon

Successive governments have taken up various projects worth hundreds of crores of taka to solve this, but they only brought brief relief. Many of the projects were faulty. But more than that, every time the government initiated any projects, powerful locals blocked those to protect their interests, including the multi-million dollar shrimp farms.