Destination Dhaka

Zoning appeals

You don’t need a PhD in anthropology to figure out that some social practices broadly accepted and followed in Western countries are either alien—or simply ignored—in other cultures. A case in point is the orderly line or queue. 

It’s certainly annoying when someone jumps in ahead of you at passport control or while you’re in line at a bank or waiting to pay for your groceries, but it’s hardly a crowd control issue. However, queue-hopping becomes a problem when a lot of people do it simultaneously. It certainly creates a challenge for global organizations such as airlines that need to control human movement.

I had met my colleague, Nicola Christofides from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, in Dubai. Our flight to Dhaka in Bangladesh on an Emirates Boeing 777 was full, as it usually is, with migrant workers returning from the Gulf states. It was the Bangla new year, and many were returning for the holidays. All passengers had boarding cards with their zones listed.

The gate agent made the routine announcement, inviting first class and business passengers and families with children to board first. The crowd parted to allow a few to make their way to the jetway. When the agent announced, “Zone A,” the crowd surged forward, pushing past the few Westerners who were dutifully waiting for their zone to be called.  The pushing and shoving was all pretty good-natured, but it was evident that the battle for overhead compartment space was on.  For a few minutes, the agents attempted to collect boarding card stubs, then simply gave up. 

On board, passengers ended up in the wrong aisle and had to make the long detour around the bathrooms to reach their seats. The United Arab Emirates women’s under-19 soccer team, on its way to compete in a multinational tournament in Dhaka, boarded en masse and clambered over seats to be with their friends. The cabin crew remained calm. They were evidently used to the chaos.

Communication problems

On the drive from Dhaka airport to our hotel--the curiously named Bengal Blueberry in the Gulshan-2 district--the conversation with the driver, Mohammed Deloa, went something like this.

“They’re selling a lot of fruit at the roadside stalls. Which fruits are in season?”

“You will find many good restaurants close to our wonderful hotel. I’m sure you will be very happy with the choices.”

“Yes, but what about the fruits? It’s April. Are the mangoes good?”

“The Blueberry restaurant has a good menu.  But you may also eat at the food court in the mall next to the hotel.”

Obviously, it was time to change the subject.

“Why is it called the Bengal Blueberry?  I’ve never seen blueberries in Bangladesh.”

“The company has three hotels in Dhaka. The Bengal Blueberry, the Bengal Inn and the Bengal Canary Park. All offer superb service.”

“But why Blueberry?”

“Our staff will make you very welcome.”

Nicola and I decided that Mohammed had mastered a few key marketing scripts in English but was not able to offer much more. I reverted to a standard Dhaka topic where almost anyone with basic English can participate.

“The traffic from the airport isn’t too bad today.”

“No, sir. It is the weekend. Much worse during the week. Only 20 minutes to the hotel. One hour or more at other times.”

We pulled up at the Bengal Blueberry, where a sign advertised the Bluelicious Restaurant. Mohammed dutifully pointed out the entrance to the mall. We resolved to try the food court.

Food Court

I have no ambitions--and certainly no qualifications--to be a food critic.  But I’ve eaten at enough cheap places in malls around the world to offer some insights. I guess I can modestly claim to be a food court critic.

Mohammed was right. The food court in the small mall next to the Bengal Blueberry--two floors up from the Unimart supermarket where I’ve shopped on previous visits to Dhaka--offers an amazing variety of cuisine, and an even more amazing variety of names. Collectively, if rather pretentiously, it is called The Chef’s Table.

Nicola and I decided to skip “The Crack Shack,” which offered nothing more addictive than smoothies and snacks. I eat Mexican at home in West Virginia often enough that “Dos Locos” did not appeal. “Uncle Sam’s” offered crepes and waffles, but no burgers (try “Impulse Burger” two floors down for a Bangladesh Whopper). We passed on “Pizza Guy,” which offered the “Nightmare Firestorm” (probably the one with all the toppings).  There was “Pastamania” and “The Italian Place--a place to hang your hat” (if you have one), “Madchefx” and “Hakka Chaka” (looked Japanese). We considered the Middle Eastern place, but ended up at “Taste of Lanka,” where I had the “Housefull” combination plate. Pretty good, although more generic South Asian than distinctively Sri Lankan.

Should we order more food from The Chef’s Table?

Apart from the variety, there are two cool things about The Chef’s Table. First, each establishment has a kitchen and the food is freshly cooked. You pay and come back in 15 or 20 minutes to pick up (or sometimes they will serve you). Second, all food is served on real plates with cutlery--not a polystyrene dish or plastic fork in sight.  After you’ve finished your meal, a busboy clears the table. In other words, restaurant-style service in a food court.

As a newly minted food court critic, the only recommendation I can offer is to Madchefx which put out a board advertising “Today’s Special.”  It read (I am not making this up):

Today’s Special: Buy two meals--and pay for them both.

What a deal! 

Slow boat from Barisal

Since the Mughal period, Barisal, on the west bank of the Kirtankhola, a distributary of the Lower Meghna, has been an important port. The commercial gateway to the southwest delta, Barisal has been described as the “Venice of Bengal” or “Venice of the East,” although if you’re just counting waterways, almost any large town in southwestern Bangladesh is a Venice.

The Kirtankhola channel is not deep enough for the ocean-going cargo ships that steam up the Lower Meghna from the Bay of Bengal, but it can handle smaller freighters that ply between the towns of the delta region, carrying bricks, building materials and bulk agricultural produce. Motorized nouka deliver fruit, vegetables and fish to villages, and ferry passengers, bicycles and animals across the rivers; the catamaran version—two nouka with a wooden platform—is large enough to carry a couple of vehicles. There’s a new road bridge across the Kirtankhola at Barisal, but most rivers and channels are not bridged, and ferries are the only way to avoid a long journey on dirt roads. 

I had flown to Barisal from Dhaka but decided to take the boat back. After meetings at the local university and medical college, my UNICEF host, Sanjit Kumar Das, took me home to his apartment to meet his family. His wife had not only prepared desserts but made up snacks for my return trip to Dhaka. Sanjit had booked me on the 3:00 p.m. Green Line Waterways launch. “You’ll be on the launch for at least seven hours,” he said.  “You can buy food on board, but this will keep you going.”

In the Bangla transportation vocabulary, the English word “launch,” derived from the Spanish lancha (barge), is not what you’d expect—one of those sleek party boats that line marinas in Florida, or the kind of patrol boat the coastguard and police use to chase drug runners. The Bangladesh “launch,” often four decks high, carries several hundred passengers, and sometimes vehicles and cargo. One type looks like a modern ferry—the kind you’d take across the English Channel, but without the drunken football fans in the bar—while another looks like a Mississippi sternwheeler, all open decks and verandahs but without the stern wheel. From Dhaka’s Sadarghat ferry terminal, launches to southern destinations—Khulna, Barisal, Patuakhali and islands of the delta—leave in the early evening, and offer comfortable cabins with air conditioning. I haven’t done the trip this way, but travelers tell me it’s exhilarating to leave behind the noise and pollution of the capital and float off into the sunset.

At the Barisal ghat, Sanjit and his daughter guided me through the stalls selling street food, snacks, fruit and vegetables. Three launches were moored, and Sanjit wanted to make sure I boarded the right one. I stood on the top deck and waved goodbye. Below me, nouka glided in and out of the ghat, carrying passengers, bicycles, motorbikes, yellow water barrels and fruit and vegetables. Small boys jumped into the water, splashed around and climbed back up the wooden pillars supporting the quay.

A man emerged from the launch’s kitchen and laid a long blue rug on the open deck. Passengers would need to pray during the trip. I wondered if someone with a compass or a smart phone was appointed to adjust the arrow to Mecca to the meanders on the river.

After several blasts from the launch’s horn, we cast off.  For an hour or so, I stood on the open deck enjoying the breeze and watching life on the Kirtankhola—the shore line of coconut palms, bananas, mango trees and small settlements, fishermen casting their nets, cattle grazing on low, grassy islands. We passed small freighters heading downstream with loads of gravel, bricks and sand, and nouka crossing the river. After two hours, we joined the Lower Meghna and the shoreline disappeared into the late afternoon haze. There wasn’t much to look at except for larger cargo ships and swooping seagulls, so I retreated to the air-conditioned upper deck. It was a midweek departure, so I had my choice of seats. A steward brought me tea and I settled down to read a book and make some travel notes.

It was difficult to concentrate because of the constant chatter from the TV monitors, occasionally interrupted by gun shots and car crashes. Green TV was offering a steady stream of Bangla-language movies with routine plots and stock characters. The Dhallywood (Dhaka-based) movie industry is not as large or well renowned as its Indian big brother, Bollywood, but it has perfected the mass production process, churning out hundreds of movies a year for domestic audiences and the Bangladeshi diaspora in the Middle East, Malaysia and the UK. There were shoot-outs on city streets, car chases, and love scenes on beaches and green mountain pastures, the characters’ slow-motion passions enhanced by rain, mist and other artificial weather elements. Most characters appeared to change clothes every couple of minutes, the women dressed in bright colors, the men with slicked black hair usually dressed in smart suits and sporting sunglasses, even during night scenes.

It was night by the time we reached the Buriganga River, the channel of the Padma that flows through Dhaka. We passed overnight launches heading south, their deck lights illuminating them against the dark water. Many passengers were on deck, enjoying the cool night air. We docked at Sadarghat, and I emerged into the maze of Old Dhaka, the streets crowded with auto-rickshaws, trucks, buses and people. I was already missing the river.   

All at sea in Chittagong

“Can you give me a window seat on the left side of the plane?” I asked the Novoair agent at Chittagong airport as I checked in for the return flight to Dhaka. I usually request an aisle seat to get a few extra inches of legroom, but it was going to be a short, 50-minute flight and I hoped for a good view of the Bay of Bengal as the plane headed northwest. I had read newspaper reports of major back-ups at Chittagong’s container terminals and expected to see a few ships anchored, waiting to enter the estuary of the Karnaphuli River. I wasn’t disappointed. Through the patchy clouds I could see dozens of container ships at anchor over a wide area. Between them, like smalls insects, were the black dots of fishing boats.

There’s a vigorous and usually good-natured debate between residents of Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, and its second-largest city, Chittagong, about which has the worst traffic jams. I’m not going to take a position on this one, but I’m pretty confident in saying that Chittagong’s largely unseen jam--the shipping back-up--may have the greater effect on the economy. I’m no maritime expert, but it’s evident that if a large container ship has to park in the Bay of Bengal and wait up to a week to get into port, then someone (and probably more than one person) is losing money. The scene from the plane window is a tranquil one, but the economic effects are real.

Chittagong’s natural harbor, noted as early as the 1st century AD by the Roman geographer Ptolemy as one of the major seaports in the East, was the ancient gateway to Bengal. From the 9th century, Arab traders became prominent in the city’s commercial life, and introduced Islam to the region. They were later joined by Portuguese traders. In the colonial era, the British built railroads to link Chittagong to Calcutta (Kolkata) and other cities in India. Today, it is a major industrial and commercial center, with the Bangladesh Navy’s largest base. It’s estimated that roughly 90 percent of the country’s seaborne trade passes through Chittagong. With China now Bangladesh’s largest trading partner, efforts are underway, under the so-called Belt and Road Initiative, to build rail and road links from southern Yunnan province to the port. With direct access to the Indian Ocean, China will no longer be dependent on shipping through the Straits of Malacca, between Malaysia and the Indonesian island of Sumatra, a narrow seaway that can easily be blockaded in time of war.

Chittagong, with a population of about seven million, is still a city of heavy industry--think of Cleveland or Sheffield before the steel mills closed, and the cities rebranded themselves as commercial centers and scuzzied up the downtown areas with boutiques and tapas bars. It is a major steel producer, importing iron ore and coal and recycling scrap from shipbreaking yards along the coast. It has textile and cement factories, and others processing agricultural produce. Truck traffic is heavy. In Dhaka, trucks are banned from the metropolitan area during daytime hours, but in Chittagong the major port roads are clogged at all hours with yellow Tata and Leyland trucks carrying containers, fuel and other cargoes. Fortunately, most of them run on compressed natural gas (CNG); otherwise, the city’s pollution problems would be a lot worse.

Slow going in Chittagong, April 2017 (photograph courtesy of Daily Star). As is the traffic wasn’t already bad enough, the city also regularly suffers from flooding.

You don’t even need to leave the airport to get a sense of Chittagong self-image. At many airports around the world, the display ads and video screens pitch high-priced luxury goods and financial services. Not at Chittagong. In the check-in area, the major visual competition is between two cement companies. You are invited to “Trust in Confidence Cement, an A grade clinker” (whatever that means) or in Ruby Cement, part of the Heidelberg Cement Group. Both feature images of projects that stand tall because of the cement used--hotels, commercial buildings, bridges, tunnels, power plants, overpasses (flyovers). Between them is a screen displaying what holds all this concrete together. The KSRM steel company, “Your Steel Partner,” claims to build “Future Bangladesh on a firm foundation.” You can even upgrade to KSRM Premium “for colossal construction. The video screen features computer animations of bridges, overpasses, and cloverleafs with high-speed trains speeding over almost empty highways. KSRM has a claim to fame because its steel is being used for construction of the major bridge across the Padma (Ganges) which will at last provide a direct road and rail link between the east and west of the country, but it is also a utopian, animated dream of a future Bangladesh without traffic congestion.   

 My hotel was close to GEC Circle in the city center, where several main roads meet, and the traffic backs up at most hours of the day. GEC is the name given to the newer part of Chittagong, north of the old city and the river. I wondered why this major commercial area had such a prosaic name, rather than the name of a major figure in the city’s history. A university colleague explained: “General Electric once had its corporate headquarters here. It was a landmark, so the everyone called the area GEC.”  General Electric is long gone. There’s also a CDA Avenue  but that’s more easily explained--it stands for Chittagong Development Authority. One night, I wandered around the circle. It’s lined with stalls selling cheap clothes, fruits and vegetables, fresh fish, tea stands, and booths selling mobile phone recharges. Behind the circle are arcades of small shops selling bakery goods and sweet desserts, jewelry, lighting fixtures, saris, electronics, and pharmacy products. At 11:00 p.m., the streets were full of people, walking, shopping and getting on and off the bicycle rickshaws.

GEC Circle

The two universities where I met with faculty and administrators and made presentations to students on communication and development offered a contrast in location, facilities and style. Port City International University, a six-year-old private university a mile or so from GEC Circle, is in the Khulshi Hills, a leafy upscale residential area with high walls, guard houses and security systems. Compared with Dhaka, which is flat as a pancake, Chittagong has some gentle rises but to call them “hills” is an overstatement. Khulshi Hills is about as elevated as those Cleveland suburbs a couple of miles from Lake Erie that call themselves “Heights” because they’re a couple of hundred feet above lake level.

 The university has 6,000 students and a new campus under construction, At the entrance, two sentries snapped to attention and saluted. I was greeted by an entourage of faculty and students and walked slowly so that the photographer could keep in front of me, taking shots of me chatting with the welcome committee. At the opening ceremony, I sat on a dais, partly obscured from the audience by the large flower display on the table. Later, I was presented with a bouquet and a fancy plaque with my name on it.

Chittagong University, a public institution with about 25,000 students, is in a semi-rural setting about an hour’s drive, depending on traffic, from the city center. “There are monkeys and snakes in the forest,” my UNICEF companion Hasan warned me. Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi social entrepreneur, economist and civil society leader, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for founding the Grameen Bank and pioneering the concepts of microfinance and microcredit, studied and taught at the university. Hasan told me that he piloted his development projects in villages surrounding the university. The Faculty of Social Science building, where I met with faculty in communication and taught a class of 4th year and masters students, is named for him.

The facilities are similar to those at other public universities in Bangladesh--aging, concrete academic buildings, with the paint peeling from the heat and monsoon rains, large classrooms where three students squeezed together on each wooden desk, and faculty offices with padlocks on the doors. Yet it has attracted talented faculty who are dedicated to their work, and I enjoyed my conversations with them.

The university has long been a center of student political activism. While I was meeting with the Vice Chancellor, a group of students was staging a noisy protest outside the administration building. I asked one faculty member about the graffiti on the walls of the academic buildings.  She said the names and symbols represented student groups or clubs. Because the university is so far outside the city, most students commute by train to a special station on the campus. “The students travel together, and they give their group a name,” she explained. I asked if the so-called clubs had a political as well as a social side. She smiled but did not answer directly. “There have been a number of research studies done on their activities,” she added guardedly. I think I know what she was trying to tell me.

The traffic jam that never ends

Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, like other South and Southeast Asian cities, is notorious for traffic snarls that can make even the shortest (in distance) journey frustratingly long. Traffic flow is also unpredictable; if you leave 10 minutes later than planned, what would normally be a 20-minute trip can turn into a two-hour marathon. Although the city has morning and evening rush hours, you are just as likely to be stuck in traffic at 2:00 p.m. or 11:00 p.m.

According to a World Bank analysis, over the course of a decade average traffic speed dropped from 21 km (13 miles) to seven km (less than five miles) per hour, slightly above the average walking speed. Another study estimates that if vehicle growth continues at its present rate without improvements in public transport, the average speed will be down to 4.7 km (less than three miles) per hour by 2035. At that point, sensible city-dwellers would leave their cars at home and use their two feet, although that scenario seems unlikely. The World Bank estimates that traffic gridlock eats up 3.2 million work hours per day, a significant impact in an urban area that contributes more than one third of the country’s Gross Domestic Product and more than 40 per cent of total employment.

The roads are filled with cars, buses, trucks, auto rickshaws, and tricycle rickshaws carrying passengers and cargo. The fastest-growing species is the motorcycle, with an average of more than one thousand new machines being registered every day. Official estimates in July 2018 put the number of motorcycles on the roads of Bangladesh at 2.27 million, but all transport experts agree that’s a gross underestimate because many owners don’t register their machines. Less than half the drivers of registered machines hold a valid license, so at least one in three should technically not be on the roads at all. Accidents are common, as riders drive on the wrong side of the highway or on sidewalks or carry more than one passenger. Transport Minister Obaidul Quader described motorcycles as “terror incarnate.” In one ten-day clampdown in August 2018, more than half of the 83,000 traffic citations handed out by police went to motorcycle riders.

There would be fewer motorcycles if Dhaka’s public transport system was more reliable. Its challenges are symbolized by the aging maroon-colored Ashok Leyland double-decker buses, operated by the government public transport agency, the Bangladesh Road Transport Corporation (BRTC). It is the Indian version of the Leyland Titan, developed in the UK and a common sight on British city roads until the 1970s. The last was manufactured in 1968; one year earlier, the first Titan rolled off the Ashok Leyland production line, and for many years it was a big seller in the subcontinent. Keeping the fleet on the road is a challenge; old buses go into assisted living and eventually expire in a massive yard outside Dhaka where BRTC mechanics painstakingly salvage their organs for transplant.

Many of BRTC’s single decker buses are also showing their age. Like the buses operated by private companies, they look as if they have run the traffic gauntlet, with their panels scraped and dented, their windows missing or shattered, headlamps broken, their exhausts belching smoke. To offset their appearance, many sport upbeat slogans: God Bless You with his Love, Have a Nice Tour, Super, Hi-tech Travel, Dream Line, All Way First Class, Exclusive Journey, Heppy [sic] New Year.  The government estimates that about 4,500 private buses, owned by almost 2,000 small companies, are on the road in Dhaka, competing on a maze of 165 routes. 

Many of the auto rickshaws, the CNGs, are also casualties of the daily jousts and stand-offs on city roads. Because they are smaller than buses and cars, their operators, who sometimes stretch their leg muscles by propping their feet on the handlebars while driving, believe they can squeeze into the smallest gap between larger vehicles. Passengers on the narrow bench seat—it can accommodate three or four Bangladeshis or one or two reasonably well-fed Westerners—are not protected from accidents, but at least they do not have to clutch their bags tightly while stopped in traffic; a heavy metal grille door, locked from the inside, insulates them from beggars and purse-snatchers.

The government has announced ambitious schemes to relieve the city’s traffic crisis. It plans to build five metropolitan rail lines to carry 60,000 passengers an hour and two dedicated BRTC bus routes to carry 20,000 passengers an hour. It has promised to build 750 miles of new roads, three new ring roads and six new interchanges by 2035. Passengers will be able to use smart cards on metro rail, BRTC and water taxi routes. But congestion is likely to get worse before it gets better. A new subway system, currently under construction, has led to the closure of some roads and reduced the number of lanes on others. 

“Like other cities of the developing world,” writes Jay Rosen in the New York Times, “Dhaka is both a boomtown and a necropolis, with a thriving real-estate market, a growing middle class and a lively cultural and intellectual life that is offset by rampant misery, poverty, pollution, disease and terror attacks. But it is traffic that has sealed Dhaka’s reputation among academics and development specialists as the great symbol of 21st century dysfunction, the world’s most broken city.”  

Exploring Old Dhaka

Even with a guidebook, I was not ready to single-handedly tackle Old Dhaka, with its winding, unnamed streets and back alleys. I called Taimur Islam, director of the Urban Study Group (USG), a non-profit outfit that offers walking tours. He said the morning tour had already left, but that he would see if I could join the group. He called back a few minutes later. I passed the phone to my auto-rickshaw driver and Taimur gave him directions. We set off on a harrowing, bumpy ride through the narrow streets.

I met Ana, a USG volunteer guide, at a 19th century merchant’s home, built in brick in the British colonial style with colonnades and balconies. Like most historic structures in Old Dhaka, it was in serious need of restoration. Years of baking heat and monsoon rains had taken their toll. The stucco had peeled off the walls and columns, exposing the brick, and the wooden balconies sagged. Small trees sprouted out of cracks and gutters.

Old Dhaka, wedged between the commercial center of Bangladesh’s densely populated  capital city and the River Buriganga, began its life as a river port with bazaars. From the 17th century, under India’s Mughal emperors, it became the most important commercial center in East Bengal, producing and exporting muslin, a high-quality woven cotton. Dhaka thrived until the 19th century, when British merchants took advantage of favorable tariffs to flood the market with imported cotton goods, sending the local industry into decline. It was cheaper to buy shirts from the mills of Manchester than to produce them at home.

Entrance to Shakhari bazaar

The city attracted Bengali Hindu artisans who lived peacefully alongside their Muslim neighbors. On March 26, 1971, when Pakistan’s army launched its offensive to put down the independence movement in what was then East Pakistan, politicians and clerics declared they were fighting a “holy war” to defend Islam. The army targeted the Shakhari bazaar, killing hundreds. Some Hindus fled to India, but many stayed. Their storefronts spill onto the bazaar’s narrow central street; down side alleys, in workshops squeezed between small Hindu temples, artisans fashion bangles and jewelry from metal and conch shells.  

In 2004, an old building in the bazaar collapsed. The government, supported by developers who saw an opportunity to grab prime real estate, proposed that many historic buildings, some from the colonial era, be demolished for safety reasons. Historians and conservationists were outraged, arguing the city’s cultural heritage would be destroyed. The controversy was the impetus for the founding of the USG by Taimur, a trained architect. The group campaigned to have streets and buildings designated as historically significant, and so protected from demolition. Some building owners opposed the designation, saying they did not have the money to maintain or restore their properties. The debate over preserving Old Dhaka echoes conflicts in other cities, with government agencies, developers, property owners and preservationists taking their disputes to the courts and the media.

The USG may have met its original goal of saving the buildings from demolition but restoring them will be a longer struggle. Landlords are unwilling to throw out tenants, lose rental income and invest in restoration. In Western countries, a government agency might buy the buildings and restore them, but in Bangladesh the government has other priorities. It’s difficult to argue for public funds for historic restoration when schools and health clinics are under-staffed, roads need to be repaired, and flood levees built.

The Water Palace, Old Dhaka

On the bank of the Buriganga River, a former merchant’s mansion, the Water Palace, is in a dilapidated state. It houses families of the Army Corps of Engineers, one of the government agencies that provides free or low-cost housing to staff, partly to compensate for their low salaries. We stood in the central courtyard, looking up at washing draped over the balconies as children played hide-and-seek among the pillars and narrow passageways.

One part of the palace has been taken over by Old Dhaka’s spice bazaar. From the mid-18th century, the French and British East India companies competed for the export trade in turmeric, ginger, garlic, chili, and other spices. The French were kicked out in 1757 after their ally, the Nawab of Bengal, was defeated by Major-General Robert Clive at the Battle of Plassey. The victory allowed the British East India Company to take over most of Bengal, and then expand its control across the sub-continent. In Old Dhaka’s Farashganj (the name is a corruption of Frenchganj, meaning French market-town), the merchants left behind stylish mansions with balconies and wrought-iron balustrades.

From the rambling Chowk bazaar, which for four centuries has been the city’s main wholesale market for fruit and vegetables, we emerged at the busy Buriganga waterfront. Bangladesh is dissected by more than 700 rivers; although its highway system has been improved, much of its commerce and many of its people still move by water.

Three-deck ferries (called launches) were lined up, waiting to take on passengers and cargo for destinations in the southern delta, where three major river systems, the Jamuna (Brahmaputra), Padma (Ganges) and Meghna, empty into the Bay of Bengal. Small cargo freighters loaded with building materials sat at anchor, ready to unload. On the south side of the river, freighters were hauled up on the bank for repairs; workers clambered over the hulls and decks, the sparks from their acetylene torches flashing. Motorized wooden nouka, the traditional Bengali river craft with a flat bottom and high prow, loaded with pumpkins, gourds, cauliflowers and coconuts, sacks of onions, garlic, potatoes, chilis and mangoes, were pulled up on the bank near the bazaar. Porters piled the produce into broad baskets and formed a human chain, carrying them on their heads and passing on to the next link.

There is no bridge over the Buriganga. The only way  to cross is in a narrow nouka, poled by a boatman. One USG volunteer asked if I would like to take a trip.  I looked at the wobbling craft and the dirty water. “I think I’ll just stick with the walking tour,” I said.  

River grabbers

Along both banks of the Turag River in the sprawling suburb of Savar, northwest of Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, cargo boats are moored, bobbing gently in the slow current, their once brightly painted colors faded from the tropical sun. Unlike most cargo boats, they’re not going anywhere, or at least not far. Metal tubing—about the diameter of a furnace pipe—extends from each boat’s hold, then loops down into the water. A diesel-powered motor sucks sand from the river bottom. The water line around the boat rises slowly as it fills with wet sand; when the crew reckon it can hold no more without sinking, it limps a short distance downstream to a makeshift dock where the sand is offloaded onto trucks.

What looks like a dredging operation to improve river navigation is in fact part of a money-making scheme by land developers. Most of the gritty, greyish sand mined from the Turag and Dhaka’s other rivers—the Buriganga, Balu, Shitalakkhaya and Shaleshwari—does not travel far. Trucks dump huge piles along the river banks to form the shaky foundation on which homes, apartments and factories will be built. Hand-lettered “Land for sale” signs promise future profits. My UNICEF colleague Yasmin Khan translated: “You buy the land now, and you can build in five years.”

It’s all about population pressures. The Dhaka area is experiencing a residential and commercial construction boom, and land is at a premium.  For years, so-called “river-grabbers” have been filling up the foreshore—the area between the high- and low-water marks—erecting  retaining walls, planting trees and building homes, factories and commercial establishments. A landmark 2009 High Court judgment was supposed to rescue Dhaka’s rivers by delineating their boundaries. According to the Daily Star, the decision became “the death warrant” for the rivers. Demarcation pillars were set up along the banks during the dry season when the water level was low. It’s estimated that 2,500 acres of foreshore and wetlands were left outside the official boundaries—an open invitation to developers to move in and start filling in the banks.

In 2016, the Daily Star used photos of the Turag over a five-year span to document its slow decline into what one local farmer called “a drainage ditch.” In mixed industrial-residential areas such as Savar, most development goes unregulated; a government inspector may levy (and then pocket) a fine, but business interests, allied with government officials, act with impunity.  The “river-gobblers,” writes the Daily Star, are “powerful, rich and ruthless” and “have no difficulty maneuvering the legal system and the land administration.” Reclaimed land is now occupied by sand and concrete companies, private universities and mosques. As one local official complained: “The river encroachers come back immediately after being evicted and we don’t have adequate manpower to constantly guard against that.”  It’s rare that building projects are shut down. Even those on shifting sands.

Land of rivers

For a small country, close in size to its near neighbor, Nepal, or about the size of Illinois or Iowa, Bangladesh has an exceptionally large number of rivers, around 700 according to most estimates. Roughly 10 per cent of its land area is water, a high proportion considering that it has no large lakes. In other words, most of that water is moving, at least in the monsoon season. And when Bangladesh floods, as much as one third of its land area may be under water. The rivers are constantly shifting course, creating new channels or distributaries, making accurate mapping a frustrating exercise.

Three major river systems combine and empty into the Bay of Bengal. After flowing across the Indian state of Assam, the Brahmaputra turns south to enter Bangladesh where it is called the Jamuna. The second system is the Padma, the name given to the Ganges in Bangladesh. The third river system, the Meghna, also brings together rivers flowing out of India’s northeast. The combined waters of the Padma and western Jamuna join the Meghna south of Dhaka to form the Lower Meghna. At its widest point, the Lower Meghna is almost eight miles across, land, river and ocean merging into one hazy landscape. A maze of channels and distributaries combine into the great Gangetic Delta. At 23,000 square miles, it’s the largest delta in the world—the size of Lake Huron or almost as large as the state of West Virginia. The delta is ground zero for climate change, with floods and cyclones blowing up from the Bay of Bengal to submerge low-lying islands and push brackish saltwater inland. 

For Bangladesh’s rural population, the river is interwoven with every aspect of their lives. It sustains agriculture—rice paddies, fields of corn, mango orchards, fish and shrimp farms, herds of cattle, and flocks of ducks. It is the main highway for commerce, with nouka carrying fruit, vegetables, livestock, and building materials. In many places, you need to travel by river to reach the school, the health clinic or the government office.

The river, its seasons and rhythms, are common themes in Bangla literature. They figure prominently in the novels, short stories, plays, poems and songs of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), a leading figure in the Bengal Renaissance and the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.

As a zamindar—a hereditary landlord with the right to collect taxes from farmers—he and his entourage cruised the Padma and its tributaries on the well-appointed family houseboat. He witnessed the grinding poverty of rural Bengal and studied its folk traditions and songs. Several works from this period focus on the river, both literally and metaphorically, as in his famous poem, The Golden Boat (1894):

Clouds rumbling in the sky; teeming rain.
I sit on the river bank, sad and alone.
The sheaves lie gathered, harvest has ended,
The river is swollen and fierce in its flow.
As we cut the paddy it started to rain. 

Who is this, steering close to the shore
Singing? I feel that she is someone I know.
The sails are filled wide, she gazes ahead,
Waves break helplessly against the boat each side.
I watch and feel I have seen her face before. 

Oh, to what foreign land do you sail?
Come to the bank and moor your boat for a while.
Go where you want to, give where you care to,
But come to the bank a moment, show your smile -
Take away my golden paddy when you sail. 

For Tagore, the river was more than a setting for tales of love won and lost, or a place to marvel at the beauty and power of nature. From the 1920s, he became increasingly involved in social and political causes. He supported Indian independence while denouncing the elitism of its educated, urban leaders who, he felt, put political goals ahead of relieving poverty and suffering. In his later works, the river becomes a metaphor for class and social justice. In the poem Kopai, he compares a small river “intimate with the villages” where “the land and water exist in no hostility” to the majestic Padma, which is indifferent to humanity:

She’s different. She flows by the localities,

She tolerates them but does not acknowledge;

Pure is her aristocratic rhythm.

Across the wide Jamuna

For centuries, the Jamuna, the name given to the Brahmaputra in Bangladesh, had, like Tagore’s Padma, its own “aristocratic rhythm,” dividing the country vertically into two nearly equal halves. It was both a highway and a barrier to travel and trade. The only east-west links were by ferries carrying vehicles, rail cars, freight and passengers. Ferry traffic depended on navigability; in rough weather or in the dry season, east-west commerce was practically halted.

Soon after partition in 1947, political parties and businesses began campaigning for a bridge across the Jamuna. Consultants were hired, feasibility studies commissioned, and committees appointed. The project was abandoned more than once. By 1982, the estimated cost had climbed from $175 to $420 million. The clincher was to make it a multipurpose bridge, carrying a two-lane roadway, a dual-gauge railroad line, a natural gas pipeline and power and telecommunications lines. It was named the Bangabandhu Bridge, in honor of the hero of the independence movement, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, known popularly as Bangabandhu (Friend of Bengal). By the time his daughter and then-president Sheikh Hasina opened it in 1998, the cost had risen to almost $700 million.

Building the bridge meant taming the river. Records showed that at flood stage, the Jamuna could stretch almost nine miles across. A nine-mile bridge was not in anyone’s cost calculations, so engineers built a channel to confine the Jamuna, keeping the bridge length down to 3 ½ miles. Construction required anchoring 49 spans in the river bed, and building east and west viaducts, each with 12 spans. When opened, it was the 11th longest bridge in the world.

Swimming to Bangladesh

Midway through the first afternoon of the August 2017 UNICEF workshop for university faculty on communication for development, one participant rubbed his head and glanced towards the ceiling. Sure enough, a steady drip of water was coming through the acoustic tile. He shifted his chair. Soon, drips appeared in other places. People started moving tables and chairs, and a janitor placed a bucket below the leakiest spot. Then someone noticed water dripping onto the lectern and rescued the laptop. I looked up at the acoustic tiles, many of which were stained brown and black. This was evidently not the first time rain had come through the roof of the University Grants Commission building in Dhaka. No one complained or even commented. In monsoon season, you expect to get wet.  

There is flooding in Bangladesh every year, but the floods of 2017 were the worst in a decade. The first rains came in April, fully three months ahead of the normal monsoon season, inundating paddies before farmers could harvest the first of the three annual rice crops. After several weeks of rain in July and August, rivers and streams in the north burst their banks, inundating thousands of acres of farmland and washing away homes, schools, shops, vehicles and livestock. According to the government’s Meteorological Department, on a single day, August 11, almost a week's worth of average monsoon rainfall was dumped across parts of the country in the space of a few hours. By the time the rains eased, and the floodwaters began to recede, almost 150 people had lost their lives, 700,000 homes had been damaged or destroyed and up to a third of agricultural land submerged. The waters destroyed rice crops and washed out the fish ponds that provide the main source of protein for the rural population. More than eight million people sought shelter on higher ground or on narrow levees, erecting flimsy shelters of bamboo poles and tarpaulins, without food, clothes, clean water or sanitation facilities. 

"People are used to seasonal flooding but nothing to this degree,” Corinne Ambler of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) told CNN. “This is a different level—for miles around all you can see is water, the flooding has transformed the countryside. People were fearful they would soon begin to starve." By the third week in August, most vegetable prices had shot up by at least 50 per cent, with the price of onions and chili—essential ingredients in many dishes—doubling. The flooding was the most serious since 2007 when more than half the country was affected and more than 1,000 people, most of them children, died. In August 2017, across India, Nepal and Bangladesh, more than 1,200 people died from flooding and landslides and 40 million were affected.

For the Bangladesh government, NGOs and international relief organizations, providing clean water and sanitation were the major priorities. Floodwaters provide breeding grounds for water-borne diseases such as diarrhea, malaria, dengue and Japanese encephalitis. Reaching stranded communities was challenging because the floods washed away roads, bridges and railroads. A newspaper front page photo showed a woman walking along the buckled tracks of a railroad in a badly-hit region of the northwest. The force of the waters had washed away the track bed, and submerged the tracks for three days, leaving them looking “like those of a roller-coaster.”

The Dhaka-Dinajpur line at Kauguan in August 2017 after flood waters washed away the track bed. Courtesy The Daily Star.

Dhaka escaped the worst of the flooding, although rising water in streams and lakes washed away banks and inundated the rough shacks and market stalls where poor families, many of them migrants from rural areas, eke out a living as bicycle rickshaw drivers and roadside vendors. Roads in low-lying areas were under knee-to-waist high water. Urban planners blamed the waterlogging on inadequate drainage and pumping systems and accused government officials and contractors of corruption, shoddy construction and poor maintenance. Over the years, private developers have filled in sections of the canals and rivers that serve as the city’s main drainage channels. Culverts that feed into the waterways are often clogged with garbage and building materials.

The morning after the laptop rescue the rains came again, heavier than the day before. In the lobby of the Ascott Palace Hotel, my colleagues and I waited for the hotel van, wondering how we would reach it without being soaked to the skin. For the staff, it was a familiar challenge. At the entrance, a canopy extended several feet into the street. The van drew up and a guard held up a brightly colored umbrella, almost four feet in diameter, to cover the three steps from the canopy to the door, while still remembering to give us the customary salute. 

Three days of monsoon rains in July 2017 left many roads in Dhaka under water. Courtesy The Daily Star.

Most travelers were not so lucky. Bicycle and bicycle rickshaw drivers pedaled unsteadily through the torrent, one hand on the handlebars and the other clutching an umbrella. Cars sped by, their tires splashing them; one poor cyclist got a double whammy when cars passed him simultaneously on both sides. Auto-rickshaws—the so-called CNGs, powered by compressed natural gas—stalled out, forcing their drivers to push them to the roadside. Street cleaners and construction workers, carrying bricks in baskets on their heads, had no protection from the downpour.

Rickshaws and vans push through the water in Chittagong after six hours of heavy rain in April 2017 left many areas of the port city flooded. Courtesy The Daily Star.

Most workshop participants showed up late that morning. One said it had taken him 2 ½ hours to make a five-mile trip across the city, but he was nonplussed; he was from Chittagong, where flooding is usually much worse than in Dhaka. On a previous visit in April my UNICEF colleague Yasmin Khan had translated a newspaper cartoon. It depicted the portly, bespectacled mayor of Chittagong, happily floating on an inner tube, while his constituents struggled through the flood waters. The caption read: “Mayors come and go but citizens continue to suffer.”