Have we led ourselves to inevitable doom?

Defying the law, locally influential people are illegally extracting sand from many sites of different rivers and seashores across the country, affecting biodiversity and upsetting ecosystems in the country’s waters.

Only two decades ago, people bathed in the Hyderabad canal in Tongi, Gazipur.

It is a tragic irony that riverine Bangladesh has become the land of dying rivers.

The country’s rivers and canals in sixty districts are in distress with at least 45,148 grabbers identified, according to official lists so far prepared by the respective deputy commissioners and submitted to the National River Conservation Commission.

The deplorable conditions of the rivers around Dhaka city and elsewhere in the country due to encroachment and pollution are the result of inaction of the river custodians and their complicity with the grabbers for decades, National River Conservation Commission Chairman Muzibur Rahman Howlader has said.