We are losing Dhaka. Or, more appropriately, Dhaka is getting submerged under the weight of the problems piling on it on an everyday basis. The tranquil city we once knew, in the 1960s and 1970s, went out of our lives long ago. There can hardly be any point in complaining about that loss.
The problem today is that the city we --- and by that we mean citizens as well as the various organisations responsible for ensuring that Dhaka keeps moving at a reasonably good pace --- are trying to hold on to for dear life is going away from us. Ask people who need to catch a train at Kamalapur or a flight at Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport. They remain stranded in traffic knots which cannot be untied. Their trains and their planes leave without them.
Nowhere in the world is there a national capital which comes close to resembling Bangladesh's most important city. People who need no more than fifteen minutes from their homes in Baridhara to reach the airport leave, in their state of panic, for the airport three hours before their flight takes off. Even so, they are unable to board the aircraft. In a number of instances, an intending passenger watches, forlorn from his car, the aircraft he had been supposed to be on, take off. He can do nothing about it.
Many have been the plans valiantly declared over the years of Dhaka being transformed into a city in line with modern specifications and intended to be like any other modern metropolis in the world. We have two city corporations, set up to replace the single entity that was weighed down with a load it could not cope with. But the arrival of these two city corporations has hardly helped. If anything, the problems have only multiplied on their watch.
Take the simple matter of mosquito eradication, for mosquitoes these days and in earlier times have pushed citizens into the dengue quagmire. Ask any city corporation official about the menace, about the corrective measures being taken. The standard reply is that the problem will be neutralized soon. The problem persists.
The nation's capital has, right before our eyes, mutated into a sprawling urban slum, so much so that visitors from abroad, native as well as foreign, choose to take up residence at hotels near the airport rather than plough into the city proper. Observe what once were beautiful residential zones --- Wari, Dhanmondi, Gulshan, Banani --- with sidewalks for people to happily stroll along. Those zones have vanished and been replaced by ugly landscapes of shopping centres, restaurants, schools, banks, universities and what have you. Dhaka today has no area that can properly be referred to as a residential zone. Crass commercialism has annihilated the residual beauty, that which survived the post-1970s, of the city.
Travel anywhere in South Asia. Calcutta, Delhi, Lahore, Islamabad are places where populations have certainly gone up, but they have not turned into slums. In contrast, a major problem for Dhaka is the constant stream of people who come to it in search of work and do not go back. That raises the question of devolution, of decentralization.
There is hardly any country in the world where its people keep moving to its capital. People are content to reside in other cities and the small towns dotting the land … because the opportunities necessary for a decent existence are all present there. In our clime, because we have not been able to create the perfect conditions for people to stay at home in towns and cities away from Dhaka, we feel the pressure.
Yes, historically Dhaka was not planned to be the national capital it became following the War of Liberation. Structured in British colonial times, with a little tinkering here and there in the Pakistani era, the city was unable to move out of the straitjacket it was caught in. Its predicament has only deepened. Some new roads have been built.
A ubiquity of flyovers has come up, with one going through the university area and casting a long dark shadow over it. Nowhere do vehicles get stuck on flyovers anywhere. Our Dhaka flyovers are a different spectacle altogether. They become all too often elongated, open-air showrooms of vehicles of different brands and make.
Clearly, urban planning has been a failed enterprise where making Dhaka a properly livable city is the issue. Too much attention has been focused on commercialization and too little on aesthetics. Parks in local areas have either been done away with or, in many cases, commandeered by the unscrupulous. Where in an age now lost children could spend time after school in playing football or other games in local playgrounds, they are now compelled to stay home, their eyes glued to mobile phones.
The crowd of schools in the city has without question provided space for children to pursue studies. But with a large number of these schools located in rented buildings that are erstwhile homes of their owners, there are no playgrounds for the children to indulge their passion for games and for physical training classes.
The nation's capital is a city where roads are never safe, for all year round and especially in the monsoon season they are dug up on one pretext or another, pushing citizens into grave discomfort. Why are such activities --- improving sewerage, repairing or installing cable or electricity connections and the like --- not undertaken in the dry season, in winter? No one has offered any credible response to such questions.
And now spare a few minutes to reflect on such prestige projects as the metro rail. The work goes on, without end. It has become a trend all over the land for project implementation to be delayed a multiplicity of times, for expenditure to rise, with no one to ask where efficiency and transparency have gone missing.
Besides losing its natural charm, Dhaka has quite been declining in intellectual appeal. Aziz Market in Shahbagh, once reputed for its bookshops, is now largely home to stores displaying couture of various colours, forms and sizes. Similar is the condition at New Market, where bookshops are in retreat and bibliophiles are a dying species. Too many superstores crowd the alleys, lanes and streets of the city; and the old street corner shops have been closing down over the years.
Rajiv Gandhi once took a lot of flak over his pronouncement of Calcutta being a dying city. Calcutta has continued to thrive. Dhaka is not dead. But it is gasping for breath, with all this asphyxiation endangering its life.
