Kafka and our rat race for development

"Alas," said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into." "You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up."

This is ‘A Little Fable’ of Franz Kafka’s ‘frantic’ mouse who yearned for a contented life within two walls, but the walls pushed him to death. Written more than 90 years ago, this is one of Kafka’s shortest stories. Meanwhile, the world has entirely changed and we have embraced an ultra-modern lifestyle. But the story still tells the tale of our life today.

If we compare the life of Kafka’s mouse with ours, our most desired ‘development’ is the two walls, which are shrinking our breathing spaces and forcing us to a life like a rodent. And the cat is the mal-politics, the low culture and the greedy lifestyle we are used to, which are pushing us to the point of no-return.

Our lives here are walled by many things. We are walled inside the concrete jungle of unplanned, unsustainable and visionless development. The development for which we are crying every day and every moment has gobbled up our playgrounds and greenery, the last resort of our wildlife neighbours. The development has invaded our rivers, canals and every other water body, the realm of our aquatic friends.

Dhaka is the nucleus of our development. From our hyper politicians to frenzied planners, everybody is dreaming day and night of building a new Dhaka in every nook corner of the country. Let’s have a look at Dhaka to see how our Bangladesh-style development model is doing amid the hurly-burly of the prosperities.

The statistics and studies commissioned recently answer the question. The results are in our homes. Dhaka is consistently on the list of the worst cities thanks to its dying rivers, vanishing wetlands, decaying greenery and shrinking open spaces. Its air has already been unbreathable, its traffic jams turned into the world’s worst that causes Tk 370 billion annual loss for the nation and its water and food are hardly consumable.

Just two months ago, two studies on Dhaka’s wetlands were published that show each year 2,500 acres of wetlands under the jurisdiction of Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakkha (RAJUK) are disappearing from Dhaka Metropolitan Development Project (DMDP) area. The studies conducted through observing satellite images categorically show 165 acres of water bodies, 215 acres of water retention areas and 2,120 acres of flood flow zones vanish every year. The studies also stated that in the past decade, 22 per cent of the wetlands have been filled up in the Detailed Area Plan (DAP) area. That means 22,516 acres have been grabbed out of total 100,337 acres of wetlands.

The wetlands are the keys for the sustainability of a habitat and its wildlife and aquatic beasts. A certain amount of wetlands are a must for the survival of this city of more than 15 million people. But, the number of wet spaces is at the rock bottom. Dhaka has already been hit hard by mounting water crisis thanks to declining groundwater level and decaying aquatic spaces.

Dhaka’s greenery is also in a precarious state. Since a livable city requires at least 25 per cent green areas to breathe good quality of oxygen, the Dhaka barely has 5 per cent of that (The Financial Express, 20 November 2017). The volume is overall at 11.2 per cent in the country (Prothom Alo, 9 November 2016).

According to the World Economic Forum, 45,000 people live in a square kilometre area in Dhaka. World Health Organization (WHO) says a city should have 9 sq m open space for a person, but a person in Dhaka possesses only a 1 sq m Dhaka should have 1,300 playgrounds, but the two city corporations have only 235. At least 1,100 more grounds are needed to make Dhaka livable.

The rivers, the invaluable watercourses, which theoretically gave birth to this city, to some extent the country, are on the brink of extinction as well. The rivers are grabbed, polluted and murdered in the name of the development.

More than a thousand rivers created this ‘deltaic land’ down hundreds of years, but now only half of them remain in our memory. Bangladesh Water Development Board (BWDB) mentioned names of 405 rivers in its 6 volumes of ‘Bangladesher Nad-Nadi’ (Rivers of Bangladesh). Banglapedia stretches the list a bit longer taking it to 700. Some say the number should be at least 800.

Reality is exasperating. A decade ago on 19 May 2009, a Reuters report noted that Bangladesh has about 230 small and large rivers flowing. The number is falling every year.

A report of Poribesh Bachao Andolon in 2015 stated the about 90,000 cubic metres of untreated industrial waste is thrown into the country's rivers every day (The Daily Star).

A World Bank study shows four major rivers in and around Dhaka - Buriganga, Shitalakhya, Turag and Balu - receive 1.5 million cubic metres of wastewater every day from 7,000 industrial units in surrounding areas and additional 500,000 cubic metres from other sources (Reuters). The rivers have already been uninhabitable for aquatic creatures. The four rivers built a sacred ring around the city, but nowadays none of them are in good shape.

Since independence, Bangladesh has lost more than three-fourths of the cheapest and easiest navigable waterways. The country owned approximately 24,000 km of inland waterways after the independence. Because of constant encroachment and scarcity of water, Bangladesh now has 3,865 km of navigable waterways during the dry season and 5,968 km during the rainy season. The shrinkage is on the rise.

The most desired walls of the development that killed the Kafka’s mouse and annihilated many civilisations in history are made on our own. If we do not stop killing our rivers, grabbing wetlands and felling trees, the days are coming when the Dhaka may have dozens of metros and other supersonic transports, but it will have no water to cool off engines of these speedy machines. There will be skyscrapers to shade our roads and heal the heart of our swelling economy, but there will be no trees to shelter our wildlife friends and supply oxygen to our lungs.

Thanks to the environment-negative development, Bangladesh has slipped down 40 places in the global environmental performance index in the past eight years. It has failed to emerge from the list of the top 10 countries at risk due to shrinking forest spaces, air and water pollution, and polythene and plastic waste.

“Great civilizations are not murdered. They take their own lives,” famous British historian and philosopher Arnold Toynbee concluded in his giant serial book ‘A Study of History’ on the rise and fall of 26 civilisations, reminding us of the danger we are welcoming in the name of development, a development devoid of natural coexistence.

*Toriqul Islam is a journalist and he can be contacted at toriqul38@gmail.com.