Bhasan Char, prepared as a home for Rohingya forcibly displaced from Myanmar, now has facilities to store three months' worth of food at a time. Four huge warehouses, each 205 feet long, have been built there to store food for more than 100,000 people. Once the Rohingya return to their own country, Myanmar, the warehouses will be used for Bangladesh's landless people.

In the residential structures built for the Rohingya, each barrack has its own solar power supply. Every shelter has been powered through its own 5-kilowatt solar cells, which keep each shelter station lit and can also run solar pumps to raise water. A one-megawatt diesel generator and two 500-kilowatt diesel generators have also been installed, along with fuel tanks.

These scenes were seen on a recent visit to Bhasan Char in Noakhali, which rose where the Meghna river meets the Bay of Bengal.

The project is built mainly around cluster houses, shelter stations or cluster villages. Under the approved design, every building in the cluster houses and shelter stations stands 4 feet above the ground. Each cluster house has 12 houses, each house has 16 rooms, and there is a four-storey composite-structure (steel) shelter station. The cluster villages are made up of 1,440 houses in 120 clusters and 120 shelter stations, built so that 101,360 refugees can live in the project.

Speaking to Jagonews24 about facilities for the Rohingya, project director Commodore Abdullah Al Mamun Chowdhury of the Navy said that besides solar power, construction of 32 fuel tanks (with a capacity of 2,250 tonnes) has been completed to supply the fuel Bhasan Char needs. There are two shelters for members of the law enforcement agencies deployed in the project area.

Those involved said one shelter has been kept for administrative representatives, one for representatives of the UN refugee agency, one for the Red Cross and international NGOs, one for use as an orphanage and one as a day-care centre.

Navigational buoys have been placed so that small ships and cargo vessels can travel safely from Chattogram to Sandwip, Hatiya, Noakhali, Talpur and different parts of Dhaka. In the same vein, a lighthouse 91.5 feet high with a navigational range of up to 14 nautical miles has been built for the correct navigation of small ships and cargo vessels heading from Chattogram to Dhaka on the inland waterway beside Bhasan Char.

Water from the ponds dug in the project clusters can be used for firefighting, and 31 acres of land have been set aside in the project area for a permanent fire station.

A tour of the clusters showed that about 3,000 stoves have been installed in the houses for residents to cook on. A hundred thousand people will need 1,125 tonnes of fuel a month. If wood were used, the surrounding forest would be at risk of being cleared, so charcoal is being used as fuel instead. In addition, 250 biogas plants have been installed.

At first, 306 Rohingya have been housed there. All of them had been trying to reach Malaysia by illegal routes. Adrift at sea, they were in very poor condition and could not land anywhere, so the Bangladesh government was compelled to give them shelter. They include 97 men, 176 women and 33 children, and many of the women are already taking part in sewing work.

Meanwhile, a wide mangrove forest is also being created there to protect the island's land from sea waves during cyclones. The project is in line with the government's Delta Plan 2100. No trees were cut there unless necessary, so extensive forest still remains.

Source: Jagonews24. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.