Catalog

Villagers Show the Way

Background

Gokul Sarkar pulls a cycle-drawn cart for a living. He transports people and goods, including the rice that some of his neighbors sell in nearby markets. But only 3 years ago, there were no roads, no carts—and no rice. In fact, his village was under water a good part of each year.

“This area used to be flooded 4–5 months in the year,” says his neighbor Bitika Rani. “We lived almost half the year in huts and tents on the highway. This went on for 10 years.”

Now the villagers have permanent homes, farmland, a school for their children, a health center, and roads built under an ADB-supported project. “Life is much better now,” says landless laborer Prahlad Mandal. “There is more income and more mobility.”

Crisscrossing the southwestern corner of Bangladesh before draining into the Bay of Bengal, numerous rivers deposit millions of tons of sediment in the delta. It is a harsh—yet fragile—environment. When the tide is high, seawater travels up the rivers, turning the land saline. The monsoon brings heavy rains, swelling the rivers. Cyclones wreak further havoc on the coastal areas. As the sediment slowly silts up rivers, the flooding worsens.

In the 1960s, the Government began building polders—embankments enclosing low-lying tracts of land—to protect these areas from floods. Although this helped prevent flooding and raise agricultural production, in the long run inadequate drainage converted the saucer-like polder areas into swamps fed by the relentless monsoon rains. At the same time, lower water flows accelerated the silting up of the rivers.

In 1993, ADB approved the Khulna-Jessore Drainage Rehabilitation Project to rehabilitate drainage infrastructure and convert flooded tracts to productive agricultural land in the areas around the southwestern cities of Khulna and Jessore.

Top

Listening to the People

However, the beneficiaries of the project did not believe rehabilitating existing drainage facilities was the answer to their problems. On their own, they came up with an innovative alternative—now known as tidal river management (TRM)—based on the action of high and low tides in the sea.

Under this system, the river is allowed to flood for a few years a specific tract of land known in Bangladesh as a beel. The river floods the beel with the force of tidal water, and deposits most of the sediment it is carrying, with the cleaner water returning to the river. As the water flows back into the sea, the velocity further clears away silt in the river and raises the height of the land in the polder. Once the beel is cultivable, the river’s access is closed at this point and a different area is opened to develop another beel.

The project design was changed in 1998 to include TRM.

At a time when the funding community is focusing more and more on participatory development, this project demonstrates, in a very practical way, the virtues of grassroots consultation.

“The Hari River is 45 feet deep today,” says Awani Biswas, secretary of one of the water management associations formed under the project. “Four years ago, it was almost dry.”

Top

Communities Feel Life Is Improving

With the development of the beels, the incidence of poverty has dropped drastically in the project areas. In Beel Dakatia, it fell from 75% in 1993 to 57% in 2001.

With Beel Dakatia now closed off from the river, Prahlad Mandal grows irrigated rice during the dry season. During the monsoon months, he supplements his income by cultivating fish and shrimps in large ponds called ghers.

Mohammad Sher Ali Ghazi owns about 2.8 hectares of land in Beel Bhaina, but he was unable to grow anything for 11 years. Last year, access to the river was closed after the land had been raised through sediment deposits. A sign of the success of the TRM process is that the value of land has doubled since the beel was closed, says the farmer.

“We have seen a tremendous benefit in the past year,” he adds. “This year, I harvested more than 30 maunds (1.1 ton) of rice.”

The Khulna-Jessore Drainage Rehabilitation Project has helped lift people out of poverty in many poor villages in southwestern Bangladesh. It has brought hope to hundreds of others in villages throughout the delta. Their wish now is to see the project continue.

________________________________

Learn more about ADB's partnership with Bangladesh

Visit our BRM site

Find out more about our activities in Bangladesh