Bangladesh News

The draft Detailed Area Plan (DAP) of Dhaka is full of anomalies and favours private housing businesses at the cost of flood flow zones vital for the sustenance of the capital city and its environment, DAP review committee members said in their report.

Prof Jamilur Reza Choudhury, head of the 17-member committee formed to review the plan, said the draft DAP is not in ‘good shape’.

The review committee submitted its report to Rajuk on March 31 with recommendations.

The committee, with a 13-member technical working group (TWG), was set with the task of examining the plans drawn up in the draft and whether they were in keeping with the standards of the structural and urban area plans of Dhaka Metropolitan Development Plan (DMDP).

The report states, the draft is fundamentally inconsistent with the DMDP and other planning documents including the Strategic Transport Planning. It lacks basic planning standards.

“The draft DAP has proposed housing in areas marked as flood flow zones, sub-flood flow zones and wetlands in the DMDP in Dhaka’s eastern fringe of Bilbaunia and Savar areas,” architect Iqbal Habib, who coordinated the TWG work, said.

Many real estate companies have already embarked on illegal housing projects in those areas without government approval under the private land development rules of 2004.

DAP is the third component of DMDP, popularly known as the master plan of the metropolis, and it must be consistent with the DMDP’s two other plans. But experts point out that many proposals have been made in the DAP in blatant deviation from the city’s other structural plans and urban area plans.

The TWG report has remarked that changes in the status of the main flood flow zones and high value agricultural land ‘creates scope for private land development companies to extend their work’ in those plots of land lands.

These zones have been proposed as zones for urban housing, mixed use, commercial zones, heavy industrial zones and general industrial zones in the draft DAP.

The report also said an extensive area of land have been left in the name of open spaces, water bodies, flood flow zones, overlay areas, special zones etc without specific definitions for their use.

Prof Ishrat Islam of Buet, another member of the TWG, said that one foremost anomaly in the DAP is that both high value agricultural land and agricultural land identified in the structural plan, have been proposed as ‘rural homesteads’ for housing and mixed uses in the draft DAP.

“Flood flow zones and sub-flood flow zones have also been proposed for housing, mixed-use and waste dumping purposes,” she said.

The population of the capital is projected to be 16 million by the year 2015 and at least 35 percent of that will be the migrated rural poor, she said, “But the proposed DAP is silent on the housing needs for this large number of poor.”

Though the terms of reference (TOR) require that the DAP identifies unauthorised and illegal land use by housing companies, it remains silent on the issue.

“In our report, we have pointed out all the illegal housing projects undertaken in the city that are destroying flood flow zones, sub-flood flow zones, retention ponds and high value agricultural plots of land,” Dr Ishrat said.

Iqbal Habib said, “The draft DAP has proposed housing land for 2.75 crore people against the government’s projected figure of 1.5 crore population by 2015.”

The open space, water bodies, flood retention ponds, roads and other civic amenities envisaged in the plan for 1.5 crore people are extremely inadequate, he said.

DAP Project Director Tapan Kumar Nath said that they have asked the consultants to incorporate the review committee’s observations and recommendations.

State Minister for Public Works Abdul Mannan Khan also said, “We will take note of the review committee recommendations accordingly.”

Prof Muzaffer Ahmad, president of the environmentalist group Bapa, said, “Consultants were required to hold local level public consultations at the time of field survey as per the TOR for a meaningful public participation which they did not do.”

Rajuk arranged a two-month long public hearing on the DAP’s draft final reports from October 5 last year at Rajuk’s central office and three zone offices in Mohakhali, Uttara and Dhanmondi, inviting interested persons through newspaper advertisements.

Experts criticised the attempt as a futile exercise.

The DMDP was initiated in 1992, completed in 1995 and officially gazetted in 1997. But Rajuk took years to initiate it, finally starting work in November 2004. Despite the delay, Rajuk extended the deadline for completion of the plan three to four more times. The latest extension expires end of June.

The delays have resulted in filling up of vast low-lying areas in and around the city increasing the threat of environmental hazards, flooding and water logging in the city, environmentalists say.

Rajuk hired four consulting firms — Sheltech Private Limited, Development Design Consultants Limited (DDC), Engineering and Planning Consultants Limited (EPC) and Ganibangla Limited — for the DAP project at a cost of Tk 23.22 crore to study an area of 1, 528 square kilometres. The project allocated Tk 26 crore for consultancy.