Months of continuous rain have flooded at least 200 villages in the Bhabodah area of Jessore, leaving more than 100,000 people stranded by water. The suffering has gone on for years with no lasting solution, Samakal reports, and the Bhabodah Water Drainage Struggle Committee has called a march and rally on Bhabodah Day, 5 October.
The Bhabodah area covers Abhaynagar, Manirampur and Keshabpur in Jessore and low-lying parts of Dumuria and Phultala in Khulna. Water from 54 beels drains through the Bhabodah sluice gate on the Shree river at Bhabanipur, Abhaynagar. But silt has robbed the Mukteshwari, Teka, Shree and Hari rivers of their depth, so rainwater overflows the beels and floods the villages.
At a press conference in Jessore on Wednesday, the committee's acting convener Gazi Abdul Hamid said 81 km of river restoration is under way through the army at a cost of Tk 1.4 billion, but without tidal river management (TRM) the money risks being wasted, as dredged rivers quickly fill with silt again. Following a proposal by the Institute of Water Modelling (IWM), he said, unless TRM starts in one beel before Maghi Purnima, within the next four months, and the Amdanga canal is quickly widened and dug, the suffering will not end.
The committee's five demands include starting effective TRM before Maghi Purnima and re-excavating and widening the Amdanga canal, removing obstacles to land acquisition. It also asked the Water Development Board and the army for 10 urgent steps to drain the water this season and make the land fit for farming, among them removing embankments and obstructions beside and beneath several bridges, taking down an iron fence at Bhabodah's 21-vent gate, and quickly dredging the remaining 4 km from Teka bridge with floating excavators.
Palash Kumar Banerjee, executive engineer at the Water Development Board's Jessore office, said re-excavation of 81.5 km of six rivers is in progress. The water in the Bhabodah beel rose by about three feet this time; all the gates of the 21-vent Bhabodah sluice are open and the water will go down very soon, he said.
Photo: Press Information Department / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
Source: Samakal
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