By Charles E. Cobb, Jr., National Geographic Staff
Bangladesh is a country that floats. It sits atop one of the world's largest river deltas, a vast floodplain where the Ganges, Jamuna (Brahmaputra), Padma, and Meghna Rivers and their myriad tributaries interlace across terrain only a few feet above sea level. Water completely defines Bangladesh. Every year floods sweep across much of the land. Catastrophic tropical cyclones bring storm surges as well as murderous winds. Yet the power of the water to destroy is almost equally matched by its power to create.
I began to understand this on a char, a sort of pancake of land, in the middle of the Jamuna River. Chars change shape continually as the rivers move silt--two billion tons a year--into the Bay of Bengal. During flood season most chars rise only a foot or so above the water. Almost always they disappear within a decade.
Yet many people have no choice but to live on these temporary islands: Bangladesh is among the most densely populated countries in the world, with 2,000 people per square mile (a density comparable to putting half the population of the United States into the state of Wisconsin). And at the current growth rate, the population will double in 30 years. Many people told me that despite the risk, they prefer chars to the squalid, crowded city slums.
Manushmara char was only 2,000 feet long and 70 feet wide, yet 475 families lived there. "At least on a char you can own something," one resident, a man named Nazabuddin, told me matter-of-factly.
On another char, near the confluence of five rivers, a man named Abdul Aziz took me to the water's edge. Great cracks ran from the bank back toward a small settlement. Chunks of land crumbled into the water. The children made a game of timing the disintegration, and they plunged laughing into the river along with the falling soil. "In one week a hundred meters has gone," Aziz said with a sigh.
Before a char is engulfed, its residents must look for another. "I don't know how long I'll stay here," Nazabuddin told me on Manushmara. "It all depends on the river."
Land is the real hunger in Bangladesh. Eighty percent of Bangladesh's population is rural. Sixty percent is landless. Just 10 percent of rural households possess more than 50 percent of the arable land. And Bangladesh is one of the world's poorest nations. Per capita income is $200. Only 30 percent of men and 19 percent of women are literate. Sixty percent of children are malnourished. Infant mortality is 120 per 1,000 live births.
This is a country in which any problem inevitably assumes overwhelming proportions. And of all the natural disasters that hit--floods, drought, earthquakes, and tornadoes--cyclones may be the worst of all.
Bangladesh sits at the head of the Bay of Bengal, directly in the path of some of the world's most powerful tropical storms. During the past 32 years, 16 devastating cyclones (winds in excess of 75 miles an hour) have slammed into Bangladesh. Over the bay, usually during the spring and fall, swirling tropical depressions form, which can sometimes become cyclones right on the doorstep of Bangladesh.
In 1991 a cyclone and accompanying storm surge killed an estimated 139,000 people. It left perhaps ten million homeless. That was a "super" cyclone, as A.M. Choudhury of the Space Research and Remote Sensing Organization calls it, "equivalent to several thousand atom bombs of megaton strength."
The islands in the Bay of Bengal bear the brunt of such cyclones. Like chars, these islands are densely populated, but they are more stable. Here energetic shrimp fishermen and rice farmers produce for commercial as well as local consumption. The temperature had reached 95 degrees when I took a boat to Maiskhal, one of the larger islands, where 9,000 residents had been killed in 1991. After greeting me, Nurul Huda Khan lopped the top off a green coconut and offered me its cool refreshing water. I eagerly took it. Oh yes, he said, he remembered the night of the cyclone. "The sky became so red that one would imagine there was a big fire in the sky."
Shajatdul Karim, 27, recalled that he was tutoring students at home when "a breeze started." But he "didn't give it a thought." Then suddenly part of his roof blew off, and as the wind grew ferocious, he and his family fled to a nearby concrete house.
Today Karim's island doesn't look as if it had been devastated by a cyclone. The rubble has been cleared. Small gardens worked by women are planted with peppers, tomatoes, radishes, and cauliflower. Almost all the men on Maiskhal fish. As I watched, many were hard at work repairing their boats and jaals, or fishing nets. But the island still has not recovered. "The growth of coconut is not good now. Too small," one man complained. "And this is the mango season. Look around. There are hardly any mangoes." Tests showed dramatic increases in soil salinity everywhere, though agricultural officials note that the salt content in well-drained soil is dropping quickly.
I heard many conflicting views on whether the nation's complex ten-level cyclone warning system is effective and various opinions on how better to manage the aftermath of the fury. But on one point everyone agrees. The difference between life and death in a severe cyclone is shelter. In low-lying coastal areas storm surges, not wind, are the real danger, and the many flimsy huts of mud and grass are no protection from killer water. "When it hits," said Abu Sayed, "there is no time at all. You are barely out of the house before the water comes and takes you."
Maiskhal has three massive cyclone shelters, two-story concrete structures built on pylons able to shelter from 2,000 to 3,000 people. How big a difference can they make? In 1970 a cyclone killed everyone on nearby Sonadia Island. Then a shelter was built, luckily before the cyclone of 1991, which all 650 residents survived.
"It is a fact that because of that shelter many people were saved," 25-year-old Taher Faruqui told me when I visited Sonadia. "The wind came up strong that night, and its sound was like an airplane." He immediately raced to the shelter on the other side of the island. Others waited, however, not believing that the cyclone would be that bad. Some managed to escape the rising water by climbing trees.
About 300 shelters have been built in the coastal region; officials think around 3,000 are needed. Why haven't they been built? Lack of money is one reason. Shelters cost from $60,000 to $120,000. As Marcel Fortier of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies put it, Bangladesh is a country where "every problem is enormous, but not the resources." So, little priority has been given to building cyclone shelters.
At the urging of the United Nations, a construction program was begun after the 1970 cyclone. However, the effort slowed as the memory dimmed of how terrible that cyclone had been. "We did not know how many shelters there were," Dr. Choudhury told me. "Then this cyclone came, and we found only a few." After the 1991 disaster, construction began on 200 shelters, and 340 more are proposed. Private relief agencies and foreign governments pay for building most of the cyclone shelters. But their resources are limited too. It seems likely that another cyclone will arrive before enough shelters go up.
Flood control, more than shelter building, is what dominates official concern and public expenditure. Floods affect the cities, the rich as well as the poor, industry as well as peasant plots. And the floods come each year.
"The river wanders this way and breaks that way--that is the river's play." So goes an old Bengali folk song. Although the nation of Bangladesh is just 21 years old, Bengali civilization spans more than 2,000 years. Bengalis learned long ago that the main currents affecting the flow of their lives are those of the rivers.
Many sections of land are like saucers, with riverbanks forming their rims. Silt raises the riverbeds, not only creating chars but also causing the rivers to spill over their banks, sometimes carving out a new course. The resulting floodplains make Bangladesh one of the most fertile nations in the world. Everywhere among the meandering rivers are bountiful fields. Bangladeshis call their land sonar Bangla, or golden Bengal, for the gold of ripening paddies.
In many places peasant farmers grow three rice crops a year, thanks to a combination of hard work, river-brought fertility, and high-yield rice introduced by international aid agencies. "In rice we are definitely self-sufficient," says Ken Moots of the International Fertilizer Development Center, which has been assisting Bangladesh with food production for more than a decade. "Farmers are growing more than they can sell."
When the rivers swell with monsoon rains and snowmelt from the mountains of India and Nepal, much of the land goes underwater. Villagers wait for the water to subside, then plant again. The most important thing I learned in Bangladesh was how rain and river recycle life.
"To understand Bangladesh, you must understand our rivers," my friend Mishu Kabir told me. He is a newspaper editor, shrimp exporter, building-materials supplier, and tea grower. The rivers form a vast transportation network for the entire country. Huge rafts float bamboo and jute. Other watercraft carry rice, wheat, wood for fuel, coal for waterside brickmaking kilns. And, of course, people travel in boats of all kinds. The waterways offer better connections than Bangladesh's limited road system. And so I was traveling with Mishu up the Meghna River to Chhatak just below India.
About two hours out from the port town of Bhairab Bazar, our boat ran aground. "Do you realize we've been traveling over rice fields?" he laughed.
Roads and rice fields were underwater. Here and there clusters of small huts huddled on tiny patches of higher ground. Every so often a tree or a telephone pole jutted out of the water.
The monsoon rains had come, and even the river--one of the mightiest in Bangladesh--was underwater. It had vanished. The Meghna depression had become a freshwater sea as far as you could see. Ill-kept channel markers were of little help.
Eventually a local fisherman, Rajendra Chandra Das, climbed aboard and guided us to safe anchorage. When I commented on how much water there was, he answered casually, "There is not much water this year."
All day I had been traveling across flooded rice fields, and in my mind that added up to catastrophe, disaster. But to Rajendra the flood meant good things: the chance to use his boat to visit neighboring villages, rather than walking all day; an abundance of fish; and sediment left behind that makes the land bountiful and gives him the chance to grow his own rice. "Such water," he said, "what the Lord has given us."
Sometimes, though, monsoon rains combine with massive flows from the rivers that begin in the mountain watershed. Then the floods indeed become calamitous, especially if the rivers fill up simultaneously. "These are the floods we worry about," said Tauhidul Anwar Khan of the Ministry of Irrigation, Water Development, and Flood Control.
"If the water comes all of a sudden, everything is gone," a villager told me. "Everything" means the meager possessions that villagers have managed to acquire: clothing, utensils, perhaps a treasured photograph or letter. Often whole homes are swept away.
In 1988 water engulfed the country as the Ganges, Jamuna, and Padma Rivers reached their flood peaks within days of each other. Two-thirds of Bangladesh was submerged for six weeks. Badly hit was the city of Chandpur on the banks of the Meghna, downstream of its confluence with the swollen Padma.
"People were shouting and screaming that the river was breaking fast...just like people shout when a house is on fire," recalled 28-year-old Ahad Ali, who was living in Chandpur at the time.
Danger had been evident for days: faster, angrier water and increasing erosion. Ali and his mother left to look over a possible new homesite on higher ground more than a mile away. His little sister stayed behind. "She released the cows," he told me, "and she thought that if the cows were saved, she would be saved. So she tried to ride out on one of the cows, neighbors say."
Ali never saw her again. "There was no chance to even look and see where she would be. The river kept flowing on." Since then, he told me, his mother has moved across the country, trying to put the sad memory behind her. "She has never been back."
For all the drama of high waters, it is erosion that takes a daily toll of land. Rushing rivers continually chip away at shorelines and undermine earthen embankments, literally breaking up communities.
When the flooding Meghna River changed course in 1988, it cut a new channel 40 yards deep at one end of Chandpur. Mosques, shops, businesses, even part of the railroad station were washed away.
Stone riprap now lines the broken edge facing the wide expanse of the river. "They are putting in those boulders in such a way that the rest of the town may be saved," said a man bathing in the river where his house once stood, taking a toothbrush out of his mouth.
Is Chandpur doomed? "We are in great danger; conditions get worse every year," said Nural Alam, an engineer with the Bangladesh Water Development Board. "You can leave a village easily, but not a place like Chandpur. Protect it." But protection is no simple matter. Hardened embankments force water downstream, accelerating erosion in unprotected places. Often time runs out: Land erodes before it can be protected.
Near Chandpur I visited the 20-year-old Meghna-Dhonagoda Irrigation Project. More than 50 million dollars has been spent constructing high embankments to control both flooding and erosion over some 80 square miles of farmland. But still the river bludgeons the land, eroding one section by more than a mile since 1979. "The current is so fast, there's never any time, no time at all, and we are engulfed," said Ronzil Kumer Mondol, the engineer who accompanied me.
A bulwark of reinforced concrete guards a stretch where erosion is particularly bad. Other new embankments lie two miles from the river to contain floods that spread far and wide. Ronzil hopes that these government efforts will prevent further destruction. Will it work? "We are doing this on an experimental basis," Ronzil said.
Hundreds of makeshift huts crowd a main embankment along the river. Water covers land once occupied by homes and fields. The presence of refugees complicates efforts to maintain the continually eroding barrier. "How shall we repair the embankment if people are living there?" asks Ronzil. But one resident asked in turn, "Would you have me live in the water? There is no land."
Calamity is a part of daily life in Bangladesh, but so is survival against tremendous odds. "I am always amazed at the capacity of the people to survive with so little," said Marcel Fortier of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
Fatalism is also a kind of bulwark. "So it has been ordained, so it must happen" was a frequent reply when I asked villagers whether they thought flooding and erosion would ever be brought under control. "Life and death, they take it as the wish of the almighty God," said Farida Hasan, a member of parliament.
But some are determined to do more than just survive. In the town of Kazipur I met Mohammed Boduizzaman, who coordinates the Association for the Renovation of Community Health and Education Services (ARCHES). More than 300,000 people live in this district amid fields of rice, wheat, and jute. The Jamuna River, eight miles wide here, has split the district into mainland and char land.
"Kazipur has been washing away since 1980," Boduizzaman said, claiming that the erosion rate was 550 yards a year. "We have lost everything." One study reports that 64 percent of households have been displaced at least once--the average number of displacements is seven.
Recently ARCHES has helped some of the landless begin a banana tree cooperative on land it owns. Fifty-year-old Abu Rahman showed me around. "There are 140 of us, male and female," he explained. "Every week for one year we put two taka about five cents in the bank. When we got 7,000 taka, we decided to use it. We thought about raising cows and goats, but we selected banana trees because they grow fast and you get good profit." He told me proudly that the fruit should earn the cooperative about $2,100 this year.
Although we are miles from the river, floods increase the number of homeless poor, thus adding to the already intense pressure for space. Any solution to this complex mix of social and environmental problems "will take lots of money," Boduizzaman said, a trace of bitterness in his voice. "And that is why the government does nothing."
Actually, the government, with the World Bank and other international agencies, has big plans--a controversial Flood Action Plan (FAP). They want to master the rivers. As the irrigation ministry's Tauhidul Anwar Khan puts it: "It is time to attack the rivers. We can't let them do what they like."
At this writing the plan consists of 26 study proposals and pilot projects. The estimated cost of these alone is 150 million dollars over five years. But the general goal is to "train" the rivers with a massive complex of embankments, dams, and diversions.
Everyone agrees that flooding is beneficial. Even following the 1988 flood, crop yields were larger than before. But change the rivers? That is risky and could cause more harm than good by upsetting both environmental and social balances. For example, construction of embankments could block the normally free access of fish onto the floodplains where they breed. Fewer fish means a decline in protein supply. And, says Shapan Adnan of Research and Advisory Services, previous flood-control structures have "led to disaster in the long run, although the immediate effect may be good."
"That is why we have begun these studies," says Ross Wallace, who is a World Bank coordinator of the plan. "The most efficient way to assist Bangladeshis is to find out what works best. The trick is to go in without a preformed technical plan."
Fine sentiments, critics admit, but they remain skeptical. "There is too much of a structural approach," says Saleemul Huq, who directs the Bangladesh Center for Advanced Studies. "FAP is driven by engineers."
Nonetheless, the fact that there is argument about such matters eases Huq's concern. "To the extent that the environment is a major issue now, that is a victory," he says. "Stop FAP, no. Modify it, yes."
There is an abundance of healthy argument in Bangladesh these days. One common theme, especially among younger Bangladeshis, is that the country is too dependent on foreign aid. A sense of pride is asserting itself.
"Development here is not solely a matter of foreign assistance," says newspaper editor Mishu Kabir. Shahidul Alam, a professional photographer, adds, "We would have been using the development money far more effectively had we been deciding how it was spent." Mishu, Shahidul, and others believe Bangladesh has barely begun to tap its own internal resources. After all, the decade-long military dictatorship was overthrown only two years ago, and a new civilian government elected. This is the first year Bangladesh has been self-sufficient in rice, and now it is aggressively expanding corn and wheat production. A thriving garment industry has developed. And Bangladesh is taking meaningful steps in family planning--rare among Muslim countries.
On one of my last days there I visited Sonargaon. It was the capital of Bengal when the Mogul conquerors ruled four centuries ago. Not much remains of its past grandeur. But the 18th-century Menikhali Canal does. It may have been part of the embankments by which the Moguls once crisscrossed much of the region. This remnant of canal reminded me that if solutions to the many complex problems do not yet seem clear, human resources and ingenuity have been tackling problems in Bangladesh for a very long time.
Copyright 1993 National Geographic Society. All Rights Reserved.
