DHAKA, Nov 23 (Asia Water Wire) - Rokeya Begum, her two children and her husband
Abdul Latif, a rickshaw puller, live in Begunbari Basti, one of many slums here in the Bangladeshi capital.

   The one-room bamboo hut, constructed over a small gutter on top of bamboo poles about three kilometers north of the city centre, offers little facility for the family that migrated here two years
ago from Barisal, a district full of lively rivers and canals 270 kilometers to the south.

   For Rokeya and her 20-family neighbourhood, potable water is the hardest commodity to obtain in their slum community. For migrant rural folk like Rokeya, who are used to bathing and washing in the abundance of river waters, the city offers nothing other than slightly better wages.

   Pitchers in hand in the early hours everyday, Rokeya and her neighbours go out into the city streets in search of water. They are on the lookout for something unusual, but not uncommon -- one of the
city’s thousands of broken or leaking water pipes, a 2,500-kilometre Dhaka Water and Sewerage Authority (DWASA) network, some of which are over 100 years old and crumbling.

   But while the network of ageing water pipes brings horror to the DWASA engineers, it brings relief to most of the three million slum dwellers like Rokeya. According to DWASA engineers, none of the city
slums are officially connected to the supply water pipes.

   “In my village, I never ever knew there could be a water crisis,” continued Rokeya shyly. “We have our river running along the village that provides us with water for all our washing”.

   “But the problem started when the same river started eroding our homes. We had to move to Dhaka for a living and to find water here, the poor suffer the most,” Rokeya added.

   Early one Friday morning, a group of women that included Rokeya gathered around a spot near the railway crossing at Maghbazar.

   A boy of about 12 was descending into a three-foot deep ditch that resembled a small well. Water gushed out of a DWASA pipe. Using a hose pipe, the young boy helped the women fill their pitchers, one by one. Within minutes, about a dozen pitchers were filled up. The boy then washed himself thoroughly and headed for the slum in wet clothes.

   More women arrived at the spot with pitchers and containers.

   “Sometimes, army personnel come to our area with water tanks for giving us potable water, but that is so rare,” said Rowshan Begum, who works at a roadside restaurant in Maghbazar and rents a room in the slum. “Living here means lots of suffering for me and my family, but we have to bear with this life,” Rowshan said.

   Abdul Awal, the head of the Begunbari Basti slum community, is in his sixties and a former rickshaw puller. He said that the slum dwellers had earlier set up a water tap, bribing DWASA officials. “But months ago, officials came with police and shut it down, they also warned me that I would face imprisonment if I restarted the tap,” Awal said.

   “We the slum dwellers are keeping the city moving by pulling rickshaws, cleaning clogged sewerage lines and doing so many other jobs that rich would never do, but we face the biggest suffering,” Awal said.

   DWASA’s engineers can hardly stop this system loss in a city where 14 million people are crammed within an area of 320 square kilometres.

   Engineer M A Nur is deputy team leader of the Dhaka Water Supply Project, which envisages to improve the city’s pipeline network and reduce system loss. Nur says that everyday in the city, the 445 deep tubewells pump out 1,300 million litres of water from an ever- descending depth of about 300 feet.

   “More than 50 percent of this water is unaccounted for,” Nur continued.

   “We do not know if it is leaking or (being) stolen. But one thing is sure, there are thousands of hundreds of thousands of illegal supply lines.” He said that in the city, 232,000 holdings are officially
connected to DWASA supply lines.

   “There are hundreds of slums, unauthorised buildings, factories, shops and even industries illegally using DWASA water everyday without paying a penny to anyone,” said a DWASA engineer who requested anonymity.

   Installed since 1874, the DWASA pipes badly need to be replaced. The entire network of underground pipelines is leaking in hundreds of places. In some areas, the underground water pipes are situated along the city’s sewerage lines and both lines are leaking. It is quite common to find tap water in many city areas smelling foul as night soil from the sewerage lines sips into DWASA supply pipelines.

   A top DWASA engineer said that rapid depletion of groundwater is now forcing the authorities to plan for building more surface water treatment plants. In Dhaka, the underground water table is descending at an annual rate of nine feet.

   “In ten years’ time, the number of slum dwellers might rise to ten million, when we have to think very seriously (about how) if the poor section is neglected in our planning, we shall have serious
social unrest,” said the DWASA engineer.

   In September, thousands of people from the city’s poor areas of Shonir Akhra and Mirpur, had violent clashes with police during protests demanding electricity and water. The situation was brought under control when the government pledged to deploy army personnel for supplying water in the slum areas.

   “We should learn from the violent incidents of Shonir Akhra and Mirpur and plan our future accordingly,” said the DWASA engineer. (END/IPSAP/AWW/MAK/JS/231106)