Karnaphuli dredging works gets momentum

The dredging of the garbage-laden Karnaphuli River is going on in full swing amid the ongoing lockdown that the government enforced to curve Covid-19 cases.

In the last one month (Mid-April to Mid-May), the project could make 11% progress of the project titled ‘Capital Dredging of Karnaphuli River’.

It completed only 30% of work till mid-April this year from its commencement in 2011.

The dredging is expected to enable four lightering jetties to start functioning and help reduce congestion at the country’s prime seaport.

“More than 17 lakh cubic metres out of targeted 51 lakh cubic meters of silt has already been dredged from the riverbed of the Karnaphuli,” said M Arifur Rahman, director of the Karnaphuly River Capital Dredging Project.

The project was supposed to take less than two years to dredge the Karnaphuli river to improve the navigability of the Chattogram port channel.

But repeated failure to meet deadlines by the contractor, some legal complications, and a five-year pause kept the project unfinished.

In the meantime, a huge amount of plastic waste, including bottles and polybags, accumulated on the riverbed and make the dredging work difficult.

The plastic layer beneath of the riverbed slowed down the dredging progress, Arif said.

“Using another technique called ‘grade dredging’, we become able to remove the poly layer and the work smoothly,” the project director said, adding that about 44% of the work was completed so far, and the total dredging works were expected to finish within the next year.

The project deadline is the end of 2023, added Arif, also chief hydrographic officer of the Chittagong Port Authority.

The Revised Development Project Proposal (RDPP) of the Karnaphuli River dredging has been approved by the Cabinet Committee on Government Purchase (CCGP) at the beginning of May this year.

The estimated cost of the project is now Tk 302 crore.

The CPA initially planned the project to dredge nearly 42 lakh cubic metres from the Karnaphuli at the cost of Tk258 crore. Later, it assumed that it was not sufficient to make the Karnaphuli navigable.

For this reason, the authority has decided to dredge more than 51 lakh cubic metres of waste from the river.