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.