SARIAKANDI, Bangladesh, 31 July 2004 — “This is a losing battle,” said Afzal Ali, as he watched the Jamuna River swallow his home in central Bangladesh.
“Every year the river erodes the homes and land of many people. This time it is my turn again. I am tired of seeing such devastation year after year,” said Ali, 75, in Sariakandi village, 250 km northwest of the capital Dhaka.
Monsoon floods occur every year in Bangladesh but this year is particularly bad. About half the country is under water, millions are homeless or marooned and more than 500 have died.
Even before the floods, about half of Ali’s village of 2,000 people had already moved away. Those who remain fear they will have to go soon as the river steadily eats away its banks.
It is a story repeated throughout low-lying Bangladesh, through which more than 50 rivers flow. Most of the rivers begin in Nepal, China or India and swell during the monsoon, swallowing cities, towns and farmland.
Officials say erosion leaves up to 50,000 Bangladeshis homeless each year and displaces thousands more. The destruction is the dark side of an annual cycle of flooding when the silt-laden rivers deposit their loads across wide areas of Bangladesh’s farmland, boosting the fertility of the soil.
“This is an unending cycle of destruction,” lamented Ali, who once farmed for a living but is now forced to sell betel leaves to help support his family.
Officials said the Jamuna swallowed 5 km of its banks at Sariakandi in the past decade, doubling its width to 10 km.
Some of Ali’s neighbors said they have been forced to move home up to eight times over past 20 years as the Jamuna River consumed more and more land.
“The chase is on ... like a big snake trailing us from one place to another,” said Mariam Begum, 55.
Villagers said the river made paupers of most of its victims as they no longer had any land on which to build a house or grow crops.
Many of those who leave migrate to cities, including the capital Dhaka, looking for shelter and jobs. But work is hard to find and many turn to crime, police said.
Others find temporary refuge on higher ground, including levees, sharing a small piece of land with people from nearby villages.
“Bad luck brought us here together. We share the same plight,” said Siddique Pramanik, from the district of Nilphamari.
Bangladesh has spent about 500 billion taka ($8.43 billion) in efforts to stop erosion over the past three decades. But the results are not satisfactory, officials said.
Nevertheless, the government is sponsoring a program to reinforce the banks of the Jamuna and other rivers to try to slow the rate of erosion. Workers dump boulders, concrete slabs and sandbags in the water to reinforce the banks.
But it is an endless task, said Mohammad Shamsul Alam Talukdar, a supervising engineer of the Bangladesh Water Development Board (BWDB) at Sariakandi.
Particularly so when the floods recede. The loosened earth and weakened banks are more prone to collapsing then.
Efforts to shore up the banks of the Jamuna are part of a 1.3 billion taka ($22 million) flood control project.
“The project aims to stop erosion along 217 kilometers (130 miles) of shoreline for several rivers, including the Jamuna,” said the engineer.
The BWDB draws up such plans every year but the rate of success is limited, said another official.
That admission is hard to bear for Ali.
“As a child, I used to frolic in the river, swimming and sailing across the waves. Later I realized that the Jamuna is not friendly,” he said.
“It has driven me from my home five times. I am still on the run,” he said as his family packed up their few belongings.
