The Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority (BIWTA) has proposed a Tk 2,000 crore project on about 63 acres of land recovered from encroachers along the Bakkhali River in Cox's Bazar, including a resort, restaurants, an eco-park and what the proposal calls Asia's largest swimming pool. The scheme, titled the Bakkhali River Protection and Cox's Bazar (Kasturaghat) River Port Development Project, has drawn objections from environmental campaigners, Samakal reported.
From 1 to 5 September last year, acting on court directions and an inter-agency decision, BIWTA demolished 496 illegal structures on the river and its banks with the help of the district administration and law enforcers, recovering about 63 acres. Because the land was left unguarded, at least 15 new houses have since gone up on the foreshore between Kasturaghat and the new Khurushkul bridge. More than 400 structures removed in March 2023 had also been rebuilt.
The project was proposed as a way to stop the land being taken again. Md Abu Saleh Kaiyum, deputy director (foreshore) of BIWTA's port and transport department, wrote to the planning department on 11 March. He told Samakal the resort and eco-park option had come from Cox's Bazar at a preliminary stage, that a feasibility study would decide what could and could not be built, and that the project would then go to the Planning Commission and the Cabinet Division. Md Motahar Hossain, joint director of BIWTA's planning department, said it was doubtful whether the project would ever be carried out.
The proposal lists 15 activities: restaurants, a resort, floating rides, the swimming pool and a floating eco-park at Kasturaghat; new landing stations at Kasturaghat, Khurushkul and elsewhere, and upgrades of the Bakkhali, Nuniarchhara and Gorakghata-Maheshkhali ghats; link roads, bridges, walkways and tree planting on both banks; and eviction of encroachers with resettlement of poor families. A letter from the river port office says about 500 acres of river, foreshore and channel were filled in over two decades, damage it values at about Tk 5,000 crore.
Syeda Rizwana Hasan, chief executive of the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association (BELA), told Samakal that the people of Cox's Bazar and environmental activists had campaigned for years to get the natural Bakkhali back, and that a government body proposing a swimming pool and resort just as the river was being recovered was not acceptable. Kalim Ullah, general secretary of the Bangladesh Poribesh Andolon (BAPA) in Cox's Bazar, urged the government to drop the plans.
On a 2014 petition by BELA, the High Court ordered that the 80-kilometre Bakkhali and its surroundings be declared an ecologically critical area by gazette within four months, that its boundaries be fixed, every encroacher evicted, the river cleaned and the coastal forest lost on both banks restored. The full judgment was published on 8 September, and progress reports must go to the court every six months.
The port office argues that the river is only two kilometres from the sea beach and safer than the surf, so boat-based tourism could work there. The river's mangrove fringe is already almost gone, however, and the court has ordered the coastal forest replanted; what happens to the recovered land now rests on the feasibility study.
Photo: Press Information Department / Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
Source: Samakal
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