The shipping minister, Shajahan Khan, has said the proposed deep seaport project was on the right track as the government has already hired consultants to turn the dream into reality.
‘The project will be launched certainly within the tenure of the present government. And we have made tremendous progress on it,’ he said at a ‘Meet-the-press’ programme of Shipping and Communication Journalist Forum, Bangladesh in Dhaka Thursday.
The forum organised the programme at the National Press Club to focus on the problems in Bangladesh river routes, especially their safety measures and navigability with journalist Anisur Rahman Khan moderating it.
Shajahan, responding to media queries, said talks were underway with bilateral aid agencies and encouraging responses were coming from them. He expressed the hope that the nation would soon hear a ‘good’ news on deep seaport, a project that aims to integrate Bangladesh with regional trade and commerce.
The minister said massive siltation in major river systems over decades got huge accumulation of silts at riverbeds and those were never removed to allow water vessels move smoothly. The present government, he said, has taken a nine-year project for capital dredging at a cost of Tk 11,473 crore.
‘The dredging has already started in a limited scale,’ he said pointing to the dredging at Mawa-Jazira point, where ferries now take just two hours instead of three and a half hours for a single trip. He, however, said the dredgers were inadequate compared to the necessity.
The minister said the circular waterway around Dhaka city would be made functional at any cost. A total of 13 bridges have been identified and these bridges would be replaced by bridges of higher elevation.
He sought continuous media monitoring to help authorities free the Buriganga from encroachers and infuse a new life into the morbid river.
Read the original story on the daily New Age
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