Water woes grip hills, remote areas of Bangladesh
DHAKA, Bangladesh (AA) – Residents in remote areas of Bangladesh have started an intense struggle for potable water because of discriminatory budget allocation for those areas and an unrelenting destruction of the ecology — especially in hilly areas.
Just 5.44% of the Annual Development Program was allocated for the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) sector for fiscal year 2021 – 2022 while a higher percentage was allocated for urban areas compared to remote, chars, hilly, coastal and underdeveloped areas.
A recent study by the Power and Participation Research Centre (PPRC) said 59% of residents in Bangladesh have access to safe drinking water while 39% have access to safe sanitation. UNICEF said one in five, or 19% of schools lack safe drinking water, affecting as many as 8.5 million school children.
Hossain Zillur Rahman, an academic and policy maker, told Anadolu Agency that the disparity in budget allocation between urban and rural areas is among the prime causes of the prevailing poor water supply situation.
The Dhaka water supply authority takes the lion’s share of WASH’s budget, he said. “Project implementation capacity remains a big challenge for Bangladesh,” said Rahman, a leading policy voice on governance and political development.
Areef Anowar Khan, executive engineer of the planning division at the Department of Public Health Engineering, admitted the situation of potable water and said officials have forwarded a WASH project with funding from the Asian Development Bank to higher authority to get final approval for the Chittagong Hill Tracts.
“The government has already approved a Taka 10 billion ($1 billion) project for the upcoming 2022-23 fiscal year to supply safe drinking water through reserving rainwater to cover the water demand in all the coastal districts as rainwater is the only cost-effective method in the coastal belt.”
Meanwhile, saltwater desalination using solar power has been taken to supply drinking water to coastal schools, he said.
Emphasizing the use of rainwater, he said the authority set a mandatory building code in Dhaka to use technology to reserve rainwater.
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