A City That Fills With Water

Every monsoon season, large parts of Dhaka become impassable. Streets in Mirpur, Mohammadpur, Rayer Bazar, and dozens of other neighbourhoods flood within hours of heavy rain, stranding commuters, disrupting commerce, and in the worst cases, entering homes and businesses. For many Dhaka residents, this is not a crisis — it is an annual expectation.

Understanding why this happens, and what realistic solutions look like, requires examining both the city's geography and the decades of unplanned growth that have transformed it.

Why Dhaka Floods So Easily

Dhaka sits on low-lying land interlaced with rivers, canals, and wetlands known as jheel. Historically, these natural water bodies absorbed rainfall and managed drainage across the metropolitan area. Over decades of rapid urbanisation, the majority of these wetlands have been filled in for development — legally and illegally — dramatically reducing the city's natural drainage capacity.

Compounding this is the state of the formal drainage network. Much of Dhaka's stormwater infrastructure is decades old, under-maintained, and routinely blocked by solid waste. When pipes and channels are clogged, water has nowhere to go.

The Scale of the Problem

The Dhaka Water Supply and Sewerage Authority (DWASA) and the Dhaka South and North City Corporations share responsibility for drainage, a divided mandate that has historically made coordinated action difficult. Studies by urban planners consistently identify the loss of retention ponds and canals as a primary driver of flooding severity.

What Is Being Done?

  • Canal restoration projects: The city corporations have periodically announced drives to reclaim encroached canals and restore water flow. Khal (canal) restoration in areas like Rayer Bazar has shown that recovery is possible when encroachments are cleared and channels are maintained.
  • Pump stations and retention ponds: DWASA operates pump stations to remove water during floods, and new retention ponds have been constructed in some areas to buffer stormwater before it enters the drainage network.
  • Detailed Area Plan (DAP) enforcement: Rajuk's updated Detailed Area Plan for Greater Dhaka designates flood-flow zones where development is restricted. Consistent enforcement of these designations is widely regarded as essential to preventing further loss of water retention capacity.

The Role of Climate Change

Dhaka's flooding problem is not static. Climate projections consistently indicate that Bangladesh will experience more intense and unpredictable monsoon rainfall as global temperatures rise. A drainage system that might once have been adequate for a given rainfall event will be increasingly overwhelmed by more extreme precipitation.

What Residents Can Do

Individual action has limits in the face of systemic infrastructure deficits, but community-level engagement — reporting blocked drains, avoiding dumping waste in waterways, participating in local governance forums — can contribute to the pressure needed to maintain accountability on city authorities.

For Dhaka to become a more liveable city, the flooding problem demands not just engineering solutions but sustained political will to protect water bodies, enforce planning regulations, and invest in long-neglected infrastructure.