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Download PDF The sewage treatment plant of Dhaka Water Supply and Sewerage Authority (Wasa) remains underused for years due to non-cooperation of the house owners.
A large number of house owners in Dhaka resort to linking their sewage discharge connection directly to the storm water drainage instead of sewage management networks to evade government service charges. This results in severe pollution to the rivers, canals and lakes in and around the capital.
The city storm water drainage is directly connected to these water bodies, while sewage network is connected to Pagla sewage treatment plant in Narayanganj.
Sources in Wasa say every day the city dwellers generate around 3.6 lakh cubic metres of excreta, of which a major portion directly gets mixed with the waters of rivers, lakes and canals due to the ill practice of the house owners.
Right now there are more than five lakh buildings in the city, a Wasa source says, adding, half of these buildings are under the water supply network.
However, the Wasa authorities have only 59,310 buildings under their sewage discharge connection, the rest are contributing to the water pollution, he adds.
Pagla sewerage treatment plant has a capacity of treating 120,000 cubic metres of excreta every day, nearly one-third of total human waste generated by the city people.
But the authorities say they are getting maximum 50,000 CM of excreta every day to treat, and sometimes it comes down to 30,000 CM.
The rest of the excreta is being directly discharged to the water bodies through storm sewerage network, as almost the entire city has that network.
According to the authorities, they have so far linked water connections to about 2.48 lakh buildings [Wasa counts single connection for an apartment building, while city corporation counts each apartment for their connection]. But they have sewerage connections to only 59,310 buildings in the capital.
The house owners have to pay as much as water bills to the government if they want to take sewage management service.
“So the house owners connect the sewage line to the storm sewerage drainage to save the money,” says a Wasa official.
There are two methods of excreta management in the country — connecting to the sewage system and soaking well method (stocking excreta in a tank and then sending it to the ground level through a well). The house owners have to spend around Tk 3 lakh extra to build a soak well.
The Wasa sewage management system covers only 30 percent buildings in the city. The rest 70 percent buildings should have soak wells, but almost none of those has it, Wasa sources say.
“Though we don’t have a monitoring system, we know most of the city buildings do not have any soak well system,” said a Wasa high official.
The Wasa chief engineer at a recent seminar on river pollution said, “We should not be blamed for polluting the rivers by discharging human waste. We get less excreta than our capacity in the sewage treatment plant.”
The authorities say their sewage management service covers different city areas including Dhanmondi, Shyamoli, Tejgaon, Basabo, Dhaka University, Azimpur, Mohammadpur and Old Dhaka.
Right now Wasa has a 2,533.73 kilometres of underground water pipeline network against 881 kilometres of sewage pipeline.
The sources say most of the buildings in Mirpur, Uttara, Kafrul, Baridhara, Kalyanpur, Amin Bazar, Gulshan, Mohakhali, Banani, Badda and other adjoining areas discharge sewage into the water bodies, as there is no sewage network in these areas.
“So, possibly house owners from these areas connect their sewage pipeline to the storm sewerage drainage,” said a Wasa high official asking not to be named.
He however admitted that they “don’t have any sort of monitoring system”.
When the city groundwater level is depleting several metres a year and Wasa has to put extra chemicals to treat supply water, the government does not have any effective steps to manage excreta or stop discharging excreta into the water bodies.
Asked why they don’t ensure sewage connection for the house owners where a network is available, Wasa officials say they don’t have any such system.
Over the years, lack of effective management and proper maintenance by the authorities has made the sewage connections more and more ineffective.
Officials say the city storm sewerage drainage and sewage connections have crossed and got mixed up at several spots.
During a recent visit to Narinda central sewage pumping station, one of the pump operators said they were not supposed to get stuffs other than excreta as they are only dealing with sewage connections.
“But we find the city dwellers shit shoes, cow horns, green coconut, brick bats and what not. Storm sewerage drainage network and sewage connection crossed in several places. So all the other rubbish is getting mixed with excreta and coming to the treatment plant,” he said.
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