Rajshahi lost 16,159 hectares of cropland as fish ponds and buildings spread

Fertile farmland in Rajshahi district was shrinking fast as commercial fish ponds and concrete structures spread without control, Jagonews24 reported on 8 January 2026. Drawing on data from the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) and the district fisheries office, and on interviews with farmers, officials and a university teacher, the report said the trend had raised deep concern about food security, soil fertility and sustainable land management. Those involved blamed weak monitoring and a lack of law enforcement, and farmers alleged that many ponds were being dug at night to escape the administration's notice.

According to the BBS data cited in the report, total cropland in Rajshahi district fell by 16,159 hectares between 2015 and 2023. Over the same period inland water bodies and built-up areas grew significantly, which meant that the farmland was being lost permanently rather than left fallow for a season.

The survey figures showed that inland water bodies in Rajshahi covered 15,044 hectares in 2015 and 24,498 hectares in 2023. Built-up areas, which include homes, roads and commercial structures, grew from 54,233 hectares in 2015 to 62,727 hectares in 2023.

Government officials and farmers told the paper that a large share of Rajshahi's high-yielding farmland was being turned into commercial fish ponds, in many cases, the report said, in breach of the rules on soil conservation and the use of farmland.

According to the district fisheries office, the number of ponds in Rajshahi rose from 40,788 in 2015 to 51,275 in 2025, an increase of about 25 percent. Farmers and NGO officials said the real number was much higher, because many ponds were unregistered or had been dug illegally and so did not appear in the official count.

In the previous fiscal year Rajshahi produced 84,803 tonnes of fish, against a local demand of 52,063 tonnes. Officials of the Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) and farmers said economic pressure was pushing many landowners away from crops and towards fish, because fish farming paid far more than boro rice and other traditional crops.

A farmer in Godagari upazila, who asked not to be named, told the paper: "Growing rice earns at most Tk 40,000 a year. But leasing the same land for a pond brings Tk 80,000 to Tk 1.2 lakh a year." An owner who had recently dug ponds on 40 bighas of land in the same upazila said fish farming was several times more profitable than growing crops.

The pull of the pond was not new. In October 2019 Prothom Alo reported research by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), which called the growth of pond fish farming in Bangladesh a "blue revolution". The research found that 56 percent of the country's fish came from ponds, that total fish production had grown six times in 34 years and pond production more than twelve times, and that about 1.8 crore people were involved in fish farming and the fish trade. Department of Fisheries (DoF) figures quoted in the same report put national fish production in 2017-18 at 42,76,641 tonnes, of which 24,05,415 tonnes came from ponds, against only 1.78 lakh tonnes of pond fish in 1983-84.

The same report said pond fish farming had grown fastest in 24 districts, and that Bogura, Sirajganj, Rajshahi, Rangpur, Mymensingh, Gazipur and Netrokona had seen the largest increase in pond area, with pond fish farming in those districts growing by 10 percent a year.

Under the rules described in the report, before a pond can be dug on farmland the upazila agriculture officer and the Soil Resource Development Institute (SRDI) must examine the land, and the deputy commissioner must then give approval. The paper's investigation found that this process was often skipped. In many cases, it said, ponds were dug in the dark of night so that the administration would not notice.

Farmers alleged that powerful syndicates had grown up under the protection of politically influential circles and were digging ponds illegally. A DAE official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the paper that local influential people linked to political parties were involved in these syndicates. The report carried no response to the allegation.

Meanwhile, the report said, Rajshahi's fish traders were moving into neighbouring districts where land could be leased more cheaply. In Chapainawabganj a pond could be dug on farmland for a lease of about Tk 30,000 a year, while in Rajshahi the lease came to about Tk 60,000.

The figures were higher than those heard a few years earlier. In 2021 an additional director of the DAE's Rajshahi regional office told The Daily Star that farmers leased out their cropland for ponds when their crops ran at a loss, and that pond diggers offered them around Tk 20,000 to Tk 30,000 per bigha a year.

Resistance to illegal pond digging had also turned violent. On 17 December 2025, a young farmer was crushed to death under an excavator in Boro Palsha village of Mohanpur upazila while protesting against a pond being dug late at night, the Jagonews24 report recalled.

bdnews24.com, reporting on the morning of 18 December 2025, said the incident happened at about 9 pm on the Wednesday in Boro Palsha village of Dhuroil union. According to the police and witnesses quoted in that report, several local farmers went to stop an excavator digging a pond on their land. The people behind the digging were alleged to have told the driver to keep going, and the young farmer fell under the machine. He was taken to the Mohanpur Upazila Health Complex, where a doctor declared him dead at about 10 pm.

The farmer's father alleged that the pond was being dug by force, without any discussion with the owners of the land, and that those digging it had "managed" the local administration. The Mohanpur upazila nirbahi officer (UNO) told bdnews24.com that the pond was being dug at night without permission, to escape the administration's eye, and that legal action would be taken. An additional superintendent of police in Rajshahi said the body had been sent for a post-mortem examination, the excavator driver had been arrested and a drive was under way to arrest the others.

Joynal Abedin, a farmer from the same village, told Jagonews24 why such digging met resistance: "When a pond is dug in the middle of a beel, water collects on the land around it. Then it can no longer be farmed."

Agricultural experts quoted in the report warned that digging a pond removes the fertile topsoil and spreads the infertile subsoil over the land around it, so that even if a field returns to farming it will not be as productive as before. They said unplanned digging also disrupts natural drainage, changes the local microclimate and increases crop diseases.

Mohammad Al Baki Barkatullah, a professor at Rajshahi University, told the paper: "Although it is profitable for some people in the short term, turning farmland into ponds is a serious long-term threat to food production, farmers' livelihoods and national food security."

Experts had described the same damage years earlier. In a 2021 report The Daily Star found that low-lying cropland in Rajshahi division, including large stretches of beel where monsoon water collects, was being cut into ponds for fish farming. Experts told the paper that the high banks of the ponds blocked the natural flow of rainwater, causing waterlogging around them during the monsoon and sometimes in the dry season too, leaving three-crop land fallow and delaying rice planting. ABM Mohsin, a professor of fisheries at Rajshahi University, said then: "Arbitrarily dug without prior assessment of requirements and environmental aspects, these ponds have put lives and livelihoods at stake."

In mid-February 2021, that report said, farmers in Natore's Boraigram and in Rajshahi's Paba, Mohanpur and Tanore upazilas were still planting boro seedlings near the end of the sowing season, because they had had to wait for water to drain from fields flooded by unplanned ponds. Villagers also told the paper that, despite the region's water shortage and falling groundwater levels, the ponds were kept full by pumping up groundwater.

Soil loss is a concern far beyond Rajshahi. In December 2015 the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), presenting its report on the status of the world's soil resources, said that 33 percent of land was moderately to highly degraded and that soils were vital for producing nutritious crops.

Rajshahi's deputy commissioner and district magistrate told Jagonews24 that a pond could be dug only with approval given on the basis of a report from an upazila-level committee of agriculture and fisheries officials. "These rules are not followed in illegal cases," she said. She added that mobile courts and night-time drives were being carried out regularly against illegal pond digging.

The difficulty of catching ponds dug overnight was not new either. In April 2021 the Rajshahi divisional commissioner told The Daily Star that there was no specific law against pond digging, that drives were being conducted but the practice had become so widespread that it was hard to check when ponds were being dug overnight, and that the divisional administration had written to the land ministry asking for an executive order against it.

The SRDI, whose check the rules require, is an attached department of the Ministry of Agriculture. According to Banglapedia, it began in 1961 as the East Wing Directorate of the Soil Survey Project of Pakistan, took its present form in 1982-83, and has as its vision the judicious and profitable use of the country's scarce land and soil resources. Its tasks include making an inventory of the country's soil and land resources, classifying them by their potential and preparing guidelines for their best use; it prepared land and soil resource guides, the Upazila Nirdeshika, for the country's upazilas. In 1993 the Rajshahi regional laboratory of the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute's analytical services division was merged into it.

The Jagonews24 report cited an "Agricultural Land Protection and Use Act, 2018". No such Act appears in bdlaws, the government's official database of the laws of Bangladesh. A dedicated law had long been in draft: in 2021 the Rajshahi regional coordinator of the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers' Association (BELA) told The Daily Star that the draft Agricultural Land Protection and Land Use Act, which prohibits the conversion of agricultural land in clearer terms, had yet to be finalised. Several laws that were in force did, however, touch on what happens when farmland is dug up:

• The Balumahal and Soil Management Act, 2010 (Act No. 62 of 2010). Section 7A, added by an amending Act of 18 September 2023, says that sand or soil may not be lifted from privately owned land if the land is fertile agricultural land, if the lifting is for a commercial purpose, if the fertile topsoil of agricultural land is destroyed, if it harms the environment, ecology or biodiversity, or if dredging or another technique causes damage or collapse of that land or the land around it. A person may lift a limited amount from their own land for building a home or their own needs with the permission of the upazila nirbahi officer.
• Under section 15 of the same Act, breaking its provisions is punishable with up to two years' imprisonment, a fine of Tk 50,000 to Tk 10 lakh, or both, and the dredgers, vehicles and other equipment used are to be confiscated. Offences are tried by an executive magistrate through a mobile court, or by a judicial magistrate's court.
• The Brick Making and Kiln Establishment (Control) Act, 2013 (Act No. 59 of 2013). Section 5(1) says no one may cut or collect soil from agricultural land, hills or hillocks to use it as raw material for bricks. The 2021 Daily Star report found tractors carrying earth from newly dug ponds in Rajshahi and Natore to brick kilns.
• The Bangladesh Water Act, 2013 (Act No. 14 of 2013). Section 20(1) says no person or organisation may, without the permission of the appropriate authority, stop, obstruct or divert the natural flow of a watercourse by building a structure in a water body, filling it in or lifting soil or sand from it. BELA's coordinator cited the Water Act's ban on hindering natural water flow in 2021.

Whether a particular pond breaks any of these provisions is for the administration and the courts to decide in each case; the Jagonews24 report described the digging it found as illegal where the approval process had not been followed.

Rajshahi district, the centre of the farmland loss described in the report, covers 2,425.37 square kilometres in north-western Bangladesh, according to Banglapedia. It has nine upazilas, of which Godagari is the largest and Mohanpur the smallest, at 162.65 square kilometres. Its main rivers are the Padma, the Mahananda and the Shiba, and the encyclopedia lists the Paltola Beel of Godagari and the Chalan Beel among its notable wetlands. Agriculture was the main source of income for 59.35 percent of households, according to the census-based figures it gives.

Godagari, where the farmer quoted in the report lives, covers 475.26 square kilometres and borders Chapai Nawabganj Sadar upazila on the west. Banglapedia gives agriculture as the main source of income for 69.98 percent of its households and lists paddy, jute, wheat, black gram, sugarcane, gram, lentil and vegetables as its main crops, with mango and jackfruit as its main fruits. It records 42.39 percent of the upazila's people as landowners and 57.61 percent as landless.

Much of the district lies in the Barind Tract, an older, higher landscape of about 7,770 square kilometres that covers most parts of the greater Dinajpur, Rangpur, Pabna, Rajshahi, Bogra, Joypurhat and Naogaon districts. Banglapedia describes it as rather hot and semi-arid, with average rainfall of about 1,971 mm, falling mainly in the monsoon, summer temperatures that can reach about 45°C in the Rajshahi area, and soils of reddish-brown Madhupur (Barind) Clay. About 47 percent of the region is highland and about 41 percent medium highland, and because it is generally free of floods, rainwater is its only major source of water.

Beels, the low wetlands where much of the pond digging was reported, are described by Banglapedia as small, saucer-like depressions of a marshy character. Many dry up in winter and in the rains spread into broad, shallow sheets of fresh water. Most of the large beels have shrunk considerably: Chalan Beel covered about 1,085 square kilometres in the early 19th century and 368 square kilometres in 1909, of which only 85 square kilometres stayed under water all year, and it has since shrunk to only 26 square kilometres.

The 2021 Daily Star report traced the trend of digging ponds in beels to the Chalan Beel areas of Natore in the early 2000s. According to DoF data quoted in that report, the practice spread to other districts over the following decade, and at least 17 upazilas in five districts, Rajshahi, Natore, Bogura, Pabna and Sirajganj, saw the largest increase in ponds. The DoF recorded an increase of 24,651 hectares of pond area in Rajshahi division since 2001-02, and around 12,000 new ponds were dug in the nine years to 2018-19. Fisheries and agriculture officials said the official data did not show the full picture and roughly estimated the number of new ponds in the five districts at more than 36,000 over 20 years; farmers and development workers told the paper's Bengali edition they believed the number would exceed one lakh.

The divisional deputy director of the DoF told the paper in 2021 that new ponds were needed to meet the growing demand for fish, "but that doesn't mean we have to turn three-crop yielding land into ponds. We discourage it."

The crop the ponds most often replaced, boro, is the dry-season rice grown under irrigation. According to Banglapedia, boro occupied 41 percent of the country's rice land in 2009-10, second to transplanted aman in area, but led all three rice seasons in production; high-yielding boro is harvested in May and June. The Godagari farmer quoted by Jagonews24 set the income from rice against the lease a pond could fetch on the same land.

Photo: Tahmid Reza / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sources: Jagonews24, bdnews24.com, The Daily Star, Prothom Alo, Banglapedia, Bangladesh Laws (bdlaws, Legislative and Parliamentary Affairs Division), Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)