We cannot rest on the laurels of incremental GDP growth rates and the beckoning of an upper middle income country status. On the contrary, we are obliged to step up our efforts to preserve, consolidate, sustain and enhance aggregative gains to permeate all strata of society.
Improving the citizen's quality of life is the primary goal of any development undertaking of a government. Development, and its next higher stage -- progress -- do no admit of environmental degradation. In other words, development projects or industrial manufacturing processes shouldn't preoccupy themselves entirely with creation of wealth, adding to employment opportunities and filling foreign exchange coffers. Of course such objectives are important in their own right; but because in their blind pursuit, we tend to be negligent of the attendant environmental concerns, we are having to bear the cost of the slack in this regard. In fact, it is no overstatement to say that we are faced with double jeopardy: A severe environmental degradation and cutting at the roots of a sustained incremental development process.
Let's not forget that deterioration of an environment is a deep-acting process, and with its deleterious effects setting in, the damage done might be difficult to repair; but not an impossible task to redeem. Moreover, if the lesson has been learnt from the folly of playing around with environment, a window will have opened on the "opportunities for clean and resilient growth in urban Bangladesh", as the World Bank's thematic report released in Dhaka on Sunday last hinted at.
That Bangladesh was denied equivalent of 3.4 per cent of its GDP growth through environmental degradation in 2015 bespeaks of a huge sense of loss we have endured year after year.
Another alarming statistic is ,'Twenty eight per cent of all deaths were from diseases caused by pollution across the country ,compared to the global average of 16 percent.'
Textile and leather sectors, significant drivers of the national economy, have on their flip-side been disgorging waste of huge amounts to countenance.
Bangladesh's regime for environmental protection is less strict than most other countries in Asia, and along with low fines, it is only one notch ahead of Vietnam, quips the WB report. As if that was not enough, the weak institutional capacities of the enforcement agencies -- such as Department of Environment(DoE) and insufficient engagement of other key players -- are largely responsible for the unabated environmental pollution in Bangladesh, an observation by the World Bank that finds resonance with local experts.
The World Bank's diagnostic observation is quite apt: "Sustained unplanned urbanization, infilling and delinking of perennial wetlands and rivers, and shrinking of many link canals across Dhaka have exacerbated urban flooding and contributed to various recurring environmental problems."
These are all known facts having been hammered away from time to time on the domestic circuit but actions from those in charge have been pathologically lacking. So we have others reminding us what to do from time to time with the advantage of a world view.
Maybe, the bottom line should nudge us into action: "Urbanization and industrial growth have come with high environmental costs that are increasingly harming the country's (Bangladesh's) prospects for continued strong economic progress."
