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Great deluge

19 October 2004, 18:00 PM
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
By OH Kabir, Dhaka
19 October 2004, 18:00 PM
. PHOTO: STAR
Following the country's worst flood there was incessant rain recently in the capital city of Dhaka. All roads & highways, streets, lanes and by-lanes of the city were inundated, submerged and stagnated with dirty water, sewage and human excreta. What a horrible situation! Dhaka looked like a huge sunken ship with hundreds of stranded passengers without any life boat, life jacket, worried and panicked without food and drinking water.

This was not a natural disaster but a man made calamity. Who was responsible for the deluge?

Should the Awami League and the BNP, as per their common strategy, tradition and political culture, blame each other for our untold sufferings?

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This is not an incident or a matter of a day or two. We are all-- the city dwellers, district administration, DCC, DIT, Rajuk, WASA, successive governments, AL, BNP, JP and various political parties, NGOs, house building companies, government and private estate offices -- equally responsible for the short-sightedness, inefficiency, poor planning, negligence of duty, irregularities, corruption and what not?

What is next? Should we go on sleeping like Rip Van Winkle and suffer from one disaster after another, or wake up?

Accusation and counter-accusation would never help us. United we stand, divided we fall. It is not time for contemplation but time for action on emergency basis before the next monsoon arrives.