Down, down and down we go

Price of potato has gone up. No problem, just leave it out of your kitchen items. Curry without potato goes well. It is full of carbohydrate. You may gain weight. Prices of rise have increased. No problem, rice too has a hell lot of carbohydrate. Detrimental to your health! Eat less rice and stay slim. It also aggravates your diabetics. Good news for diabetic patients. Don’t you see people around the world eating less rice? What about onion? Oh! Its price has also out of reach. No problem, cut down on onion. You go pretty well sans onion, don’t you? I forget to mention beef.

Beef is also not cheap. No problem, beef is full of cholesterol. You might have a heart attack even at young age. They don’t want you to die at a tender age. Even those who are old they also shouldn’t die at their old age. They don’t want us to die a premature death. The longer you live the more you suffer. And the more you suffer the more fun it is to see you groaning and writhing on your bed. They don’t want your life to come to a grinding halt. And we submissively follow the suggestions and advices. Why not? We do have to. We should have to. We must have to. These ‘should’ and ‘must’ are ultimately our savors. They save us. They push up our average age.

What about water? Dhaka dwellers have been experiencing acute water crisis over the past few days. This is not price hike of water. This is just shortage of water. Not something serious that should demand attention of the agency concerned of the government. There is a short cut to solving shortage of water too. The Managing Director (MD) of the Water Supply and Sewerage Authority (Wasa) asked the city dwellers to use less water. The MD blamed frequent power cuts for the shortage of water supply. This supply disruption is happening in five out of the ten zones of Dhaka Wasa. It means half the city dwellers are experiencing water crisis.

As the supply of water depends on pumping up underground water that needs power to generate pumps the crisis is going to persist. Not even half of the power plants are operating at full capacity. A good number of power plants are already out of operation because of fuel shortage. Now the shortage of water supply along with frequent power cuts has multiplied the sufferings of the city dwellers. As the solution to load shedding is not in sight the MD has given a sort of potato solution or rice solution or beef solution, if you like. The hell lots of solutions are there for the city dwellers. No worry! Enjoy your life with less potato, less onion, less beef and now with less water. Life is beautiful and blissful without water. Isn’t it?

Many city dwellers complained that water crisis coupled with power outage has made their lives miserable. Can one imagine five days without water? This is the reality. We are being asked to use less water. It sounds strange? If there is no water how one can use less water! Children, those who are sick, pregnant women and elderly people are the worst sufferers. Amid this acute water crisis the Wasa MD couldn’t offer hope to city dwellers. He rather asked them not to use running water. He advised people of Dhaka to use water from containers. Using containers for water will help reduce overuse of water. He also said they were mulling over a plan to supply water through rationing if the situation deteriorates further. He dropped a hint that the situation may not improve any sooner. And we do also believe in his statement. After all he can’t lie to his people.

It is a riverine country but still we have to buy water. We buy them to drink. We buy them to bathe. We buy them to do the washing-up. And what not? I can recall, after bottled water came into markets, for a long time I didn’t buy bottled water. I didn’t do that out of anger. We have rivers crisscrossing the country. Why do I have to buy water? We were forced to buy water. Rivers have dried up. Canals in the capital city have been killed. We know the damage being done to the soil by pumping up water for our daily use. Still we keep doing so. We know how quickly our soil is subsiding because of excessive use of underground water. The consequence is well-known to everybody.

In the capital city only 35 percent of supply water comes from surface water and the rest from underground. It is very much possible for the Wasa to set up more water treatment plants in the city. Wasa claims that it has the capacity of supplying an average of 280 crore litres of water per day against the daily demand of 255-260 crore litres. This volume of water can easily be managed from the rivers around the Dhaka city. What we need is the will to do it.

We have not yet been able to recover the canals that were once the lifeline of the capital city. They have been grabbed by politically influential people. We have heard a lot of clamors of recovering them from both the city corporations but in vain. If all those canals can be recovered and more water treatment plants can be set up we don’t have to depend on underground water. And we may not be facing the water crisis now.

This is one side of the coin while the other side is excessive use of underground water may lead to the Dhaka city to go under water. Environment experts and soil scientists have warned many times about the danger we are approaching to. They have warned that the Dhaka city would go under water when the soil comes to the sea level if soil subsidence goes on unabated.

We haven’t paid any heed to their warnings. We are doing what we shouldn’t be doing. The city keeps going down. And down, down and down we go too along with our dear city.

The writer is a journalist.

He can be contacted maksud.i.rahaman@gmail.com