Soft attitude of the government towards polluters and lack of awareness among city dwellers have literally left dead all the rivers and other surface waters in and around the capital.

Over the years the government agencies conducted small-scale drives against the polluters without yielding any major success. The polluters have meanwhile continued polluting the rivers side by side with city dwellers linking excreta discharge to the storm sewerage that ultimately falls into the rivers.

The immediate past caretaker government had earlier directed industrialists to install Effluent Treatment Plants (ETP) at their respective industries by October 31, 2007. But most of the industrialists defied the directive and the government also did not go for action against the violators.

Even the Department of Environment (DoE) does not know exactly how many of the industries have ETPs installed.

'Some industries set up ETPs but don't use those as they need to spend additional money to treat their water,' says a DoE inspector.

According to a study jointly conducted by the World Bank and the Institute of Water Modelling (IWM), there are over 300 various effluent discharge outlets from nine major industrial clusters including Tongi, Hazaribagh, Tejgaon, Tarabo, Narayanganj, Savar, Ashulia, Gazipur and Ghorashal. Of these, 19 outlets carry the major discharge of domestic and industrial waste.

Of the discharged untreated liquid waste, 61 percent are industrial and 39 percent domestic waste, the study shows. The lone Sewerage Treatment Plant (SWP) in Pagla in Narayanganj can treat only 10 percent of the industrial waste.

The primary estimates made in this study show that nearly 330,000 kilograms of BOD is discharged from various polluting sources every day in Dhaka watershed.

'This gives an indication of the extensive pollution loads from various domestic and industrial sources. The situation is extremely precarious particularly during the six months of the year from November to April,' the report states.

Asked why the industries don't use ETPs even if they have it, a DoE chemist explains the reason. He says, 'If a dyeing factory produces one tonne of cloth, it discharges 100 cubic metres of liquid waste equivalent to 100,000 litres of water. A factory needs to spend Tk 300 to Tk 400 to purify one cubic metre of water excluding electricity and manpower costs. They just don't want to spend that money,' the DoE chemist says.

Waste from these industries is connected to the sewerage system that directly leads to the rivers around the city. In fact, the rivers have become a dumping ground of all kinds of solid, liquid and chemical waste of bank-side population.

According to the Environment Conservation Rule, 1997, every industry should have an in-house ETP. Otherwise, they would not get from DoE the environmental clearance, which is mandatory to obtain power and gas connections.