Dhaka's Grey Skies

Bangladesh capital city, Dhaka, faces the most worrying prospects of an utter breakdown, within a decade, due to unplanned urbanisation, absence of civic facilities, and excessive population. Water supply and sanitation facilities in Dhaka might collapse. At present, approximately 15 million people live in the city, and many more people will be migrating to the city in coming years. Reports published in the media said the people migrating to Dhaka from other parts of the country with dreams of a better life are increasing at a rate of 6.0 per cent per year. Fleeing droughts, floods, and starvation, people have been streaming into the city from the countryside. The capital city is now bursting with people of all categories looking for jobs.

The city's environment is already threatened as a consequence of excessive population. Pollution is increasing. Noxious emissions and toxic effluents from smoke belching vehicles have made city life choking. Dhaka's sky is no longer blue, it is grey. Health experts claim that the air in this rapidly growing city will soon become impossible to breathe. Dhaka city dwellers are, thus, being subjected to slow murder. The city's vehicle population has almost increased ten times since 1992 as a result of the successive governments' failure to introduce mass transport. Some 80 per cent of the vehicles are three wheelers, small buses of the old days and cars which spew more than half the major pollutants.

Dhaka city has become one of the world's truly hopeless urban cases. About 40 per cent of city-dwellers live in slums and the rate is expected to rise in the future. 2.0 million people working in different garment factories and other industries in and around the city find it extremely difficult to get a shelter in the confines of the city. The way poor income people living in slum areas of different parts of the city beggars' description. Unhygienic condition leaves scores of them to suffer from many chronic diseases.

One of the major threats to the city due to declining groundwater levels is land subsidence, which can be triggered by earthquakes of greater magnitudes. Recently, a series of earthquakes of magnitudes ranging from 4.0 to 5.2 on the Richter scale jolted Dhaka and other parts of the country. Although no damage to the infrastructure of the city was reported but there is a great potential of collapse of infrastructures and also of land subsidence associated with earthquakes, particularly in areas of greater groundwater-storage depletion.

Taken from here