Institute of Development Studies

Dhaka, The Environmental Danger Zone

IDS Fellow Hilary Standing currently working in Dhaka, shares her concerns about the health effects of pollution on the densely populated city.

Living in Dhaka is a daily lesson in the extremes of human urban existence. This city of around 12 million people is packed into a surprisingly small area. It has huge slum populations and dense housing. There is an uncountable population of domestic livestock of every description. The maximum desirable population density in urban areas is apparently 40,000 per sq kilometres. In old Dhaka it is 150,000 sq kilometres.

Dhaka is a serious environmental danger zone. The four rivers which surround and run through the city are so polluted that they are officially dead due to industrial toxic waste. There is no functioning sewage system and storm water drains are completely choked with garbage. The city’s water supply comes entirely from increasingly polluted groundwater and the top level aquifers are all exhausted. In addition, there was hardly any rainfall this year, a most unusual situation. 

In April we experienced several weeks of severe heat wave, leaving large areas of the city with either little or no water. Heavily polluted water is too badly contaminated to be made fit for domestic consumption. As a consequence, there has been an epidemic of diarrhoea with significant numbers of deaths. ICDDRB, one of our partners where I am partly based, runs the only free hospital in Dhaka which treats acute diarrhoea cases. Since March, it has doubled the daily number of admissions.

It is also the seasonal flu season here, so when swine flu made headlines in Bangladesh, it mainly provoked the wry comment: ‘how would we know if it hits Dhaka?’ Avian flu is already widespread in every district of Bangladesh as poultry farming is such a major source of livelihood. 

This challenges one’s sense of what constitutes ‘health’ and appropriate research. What are priorities when everything is a priority? Concerns over infectious and chronic diseases, toxic chemicals, vehicle emissions, climate emergencies, contaminated food and water supplies are all crucial issues.

There is some attempt at the School of Public Health to train government doctors in public health, but current public health curricula seem to reflect the narrowing of the concept of public health.  Safe and nutritious diet and public parks for exercise and fresh air were integral to our understanding of a healthy environment. Can we reinvent public health and how?

I see some hope in the rising tide of demonstrations and awareness raising activities being organised by local environmentalists here. But they are puny compared to the problems stacked against them.

Hilary Standing is an IDS Research Fellow in the KNOTS Team