February 10, 2025
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Dhaka

Millions refugee ends in city: Tale of an urban slum in Bangladesh

28% of the population of Bangladesh lives on the coast, two-thirds of the country is less than five meters above sea level, and floods are increasingly destroying homes, crops, and infrastructure. By 2050, with a projected 50 cm rise in sea level, Bangladesh may lose approximately 11% of its land, causing one in every seven people in Bangladesh will be displaced.

Rafiqul Islam was only eight years old when the sea swallowed his ancestral home in Hoyokbada village of South Hatia, located on the shores of Bay of Bengal, back in 1960. Rafiqul had to re-construct his home in the same area multiple times.

But the sea kept creeping in closer and closer every year. Running out of options after losing his home twice more between 1960 and 1980, Rafiqul took his family to Chittagong city in search of work and shelter in 1980. He is now in his seventies.

After renting a place to live for some time, Rafiqul had initially settled in the port city’s Sholoshohor slum.

Slums in Chittagong Hills.
Slums in Chittagong Hills.

Moving to Chittagong’s biggest slum 

In 2004, more than 10,000 slum dwellers just like Rafiqul were evicted from the city. Later, with the assurance of the then government and opposition leaders, they started living in public land of Jungle Salimpur under Sitakunda Upazila (sub-district), on the outskirts of the city.  

A huge number of internally displaced climate migrants, who were first forced to move to the city following sea level rise, river bank erosion, flooding, droughts, landslides, tropical storms and economic hardships, started living in the unused hilly forest of Jungle Salimpur.

They were generally called chhinnamool (the unsheltered or rootless). 

The number of residents in the 850-acre slum — largest of its kind in the district – has soared to nearly one 100,000.

A substantial portion of the people, living in this slum, work in different industries mostly labour.

Under the previous regime, the district administration planned to build several facilities, including Chittagong Central Jail, a novo theatre, a sports village, a heart foundation hospital, the National Information Center, and a night safari park in this once forested area.

New Slums are building at the bank of Karnaphuli River.
New Slums are building at the bank of Karnaphuli River.

Evection drives 

For the projects planned, the district administration carried out an eviction campaign in Jungle Salimpur in August 2022. Since then, it demolished nearly 200 homes belonging to 170 refugee families by conducting nine major drives.

After leaving these families under the open sky, the administration then ordered the remaining slum dwellers to evacuate within the next 24 hours. Many were forced to relocate to other slums.

At that time, civil society representatives appreciated the move – but expressed their concern over the subsequent announcement to build government infrastructure on the hills.

They added that it was unacceptable to evict the rootless-turned-refugees. 

They argued that since other safari parks in the country have not seen much success, there is no logic in evicting the slum dwellers to facilitate a sanctuary for animals. 

Despite such strong measures to free the forest land, signboards of big conglomerates have been erected there and the slum dwellers are already back to Jungle Salimpur with the population there increasing further.

Slums in Chittagong Hills.
Slums in Chittagong Hills.

‘False’ resettlement pledges? 

Back in February 2021, nearly 14,000 people were evicted from Laldia Char and several thousand from SP Hills in the city. They were promised of resettlement, but that never happened as yet. 

Similarly, in 2018, the Chittagong City Corporation took possession of a building built for slum dwellers. 

The district administration promised to rehabilitate the rootless residents of Jungle Salimpur. Like other eviction drives, it bore no fruits for the evacuees.

The district administration not only launched the Jungle Salimpur drive without any resettlement arrangements, but sued many affected residents of the slum for staging protests.

Plus, power connections and road communication were snapped in the area. Scores of protesters were arrested and sent to jail. 

Even though many of them are now out on bail, nearly 1,000 remain accused in six cases filed over the protests.

Affected Harunur Rashid said, “Losing our home to Meghna River erosion and moved to Chittagong two decades ago. 

“Several years back, I built a home in a four-decimal plot with my years of savings, but the government demolished it in 2022. Now I am living in another settlement.”

Slums in Chittagong Hills.
Slums in Chittagong Hills.

Frustrating figures, future

A study suggests that around 38% (62.5 million) of the total population of this country live in urban areas and about half of them reside in slums. 

In Dhaka city, there are more than 5,000 slums that densely accommodate an estimated four million people.

According to the UK-based Climate Justice Foundation (CJF), as 28% of the population of Bangladesh lives on the coast, two-thirds of the country is less than five meters above sea level, and floods are increasingly destroying homes, crops, and infrastructure. 

By 2050, with a projected 50 cm rise in sea level, Bangladesh may lose approximately 11% of its land, causing one in every seven people in Bangladesh. These people are heading to the city.

Slums have emerged as an essential symptom of urbanization in Bangladesh. The number of slum dwellers in Chittagong city is increasing day by day due to several reasons, including search for work, impact of natural disasters, and evictions.

A 2014 government estimate says 16% of the country’s total slums are in the Chittagong city.

A million people on average are displaced in Bangladesh each year due to climate-related disasters such as tropical storms, flooding, and other natural disasters, while cyclones alone displace 110,000 people each year, according to the Internal Displace Monitoring Center.

Meanwhile, the CJF predicts that people living in the slums across the country will increase by more than 60% in the next 17 years due to climate migration.

Slums in Chittagong Hills.
Slums in Chittagong Hills.

Jungle Salimpur saga 

A growing number of climate refugees from nearby localities started heading towards urban areas of Chittagong during the 1990s. Many of them opted to take shelter on public land, mainly an abandoned forest, in Jungle Salimpur – without facing any restriction.

In the past, hundreds of thousands of displaced people have been evicted from at least 20 slums in the port city, including from Dewanhat slum, Batali Hill, Motijharna, Dhebar Par slum, Barisal slum, Laldiar Char, and Noman slum.

Additionally, climate refugees and low-income people from Cox’s Bazar, Barisal, Bhola, Noakhali, and Comilla also thronged Jungle Salimpur.

“At least 70% of the slum dwellers in Chittagong arrived here after losing their homes due to climate change,” said Reza Kaiser, the former chief urban planner of the Chittagong City Corporation or CCC. 

The Jungle Salimpur slum came under spotlight after the Chittagong Development Authority razed eighteen hills and opened a link road connecting the Dhaka-Chittagong Highway with the port city’s Bayezid through the Chhinnamool slum last year.

On 12 September 2022, the then prime minister’s principal secretary Dr Ahmed Kaykaus presided over a meeting to formulate a master plan for clearing 3,100 acres of forest land in Jungle Salimpur and taking up development activities of various government departments and agencies.

Slums in Chittagong Hills.
Slums in Chittagong Hills.

Data discrepancy and development  

Data from the Chittagong Mahanagar Chhinnamool Bastibashi Somonnoy Parishad, the platform that regulates the Jungle Salimpur slum, there are currently over 24,000 families living in the area.

However, the district administration says there were only 4,544 families living here in 2010.

Formed in 2004, the slum-based platform handed over nearly 1,000 plots (spanning nearly 1,600 square feet) for Tk60 each that same year. In the last two years, the platform carved this public land into 11 pieces, and developed thousands of plots.

The slum dwellers have built roads, schools, mosques and madrassas in their own way without getting government support. The main road, which is about two kilometers long, has been built by the residents with their own funds.

All these poor people are using commercial transmission lines without getting residential electricity connections legally. 

Through the efforts from the slum dwellers and support by charities before the  2022 raids, three primary schools, one high school, four madrasas, twelve mosques, three kindergartens, three orphanages, six cemeteries, five temples, two keyangs or Buddhist monasteries, one church, one crematorium and one kitchen market have been built in the area.

There is a special zone for physically-challenged and transgender people. 

Amid the development works, there are allegations that the births of around 12,000 children in the area have not been registered as their parents are rootless. 

Due to being a forest area, the law enforcers have been facing trouble in maintaining law and order in the slum ever since the settlement started its journey. 

Mindless encroachment, criminal acts

The settlement suffers from rampant criminal activities, including murders, kidnapping and robbery. Even many slum children and women are engaged in drug peddling and trafficking. 

Backed by influential quarters, land grabbers are selling and renting plots to the low-income people on a 2,250-acre area, which falls outside the 850-acre Chhinnamool settlement.

Influential encorachers, mostly backed by political quarters, are cutting down one hill after another. 

In July of 2022, when the district administration raided Ali Nagar under Jungle Salimpur, its residents attacked it.

Addressing this issue, social scientist Dr Iftekhar Uddin Chowdhury told The Climate Watch, “The large settlement that has been developed in the hills of Jungle Salimpur is the result of failure of government institutions.

“Rehabilitating such a large population at this point is a challenge. However, if the government wants to, it can take the initiative of rehabilitating them in the large public land under the Hathazari area bordering Chittagong city.”

Slum people stay long-deprived 

The government in the last 15 years took several schemes for the benefit of landless and homeless people and built various shelters. But no measures have been taken to rehabilitate these climate refugees-turned-slum dwellers.

Though there have been announcements for rootless and homeless people in eight out of 15 upazilas of the district, there are no plans for displaced people in the port city. 

In 2013, the CCC started a project to rehabilitate 161 low-income families in some multi-storey buildings, for which Tk10,000 was taken from thirty-three slum dwellers each.

In 2016, the construction of a seven-storey building for slum dwellers in the port city’s Tigerpass area was completed, but it is now being used as an office by the city corporation.

Urban planner Kaiser, who designed the building, admitted to CW that it was a “tragedy” for the city corporation to take over that building meant for its beneficiaries: the refugees.

Former Chittagong city mayor, Rezaul Karim Chowdhury, said, “If we resettle these people, they will continue to come here. So, we are not making any plans for them. These slums should be removed from the port city.”

‘Nowhere to go’

Now in his late seventies, Rafiqul Islam is spending sleepless nights in fear of eviction following the August 5 changeover.

“Once a self-sufficient in my village, I lost our ancestral home, cattle, paddy fields, poultry to the sea, and came to this city in search of shelter,” said Rafiqul, who is paralysed now.

Recalling the previous evictions, he said, “Even though I am now living in a jungle, the threat of eviction looms large further here. I do not know where to go now if evicted again.”

He continued, “At the end of the Ershad regime, we used to live on railway land in Sholoshohor. I lived there for 26 years. In 2004, the BNP government evicted us from there. 

“We have been living here ever since. But now I hear that we will be evicted again. I am old, and I have nowhere to go.”

Calls for proper rehabilitation

Experts say these displaced people have been living in Jungle Salimpur for years and evicting them without rehabilitation is inhumane and a violation of human rights.

In response to a writ appeal back in 2017, a High Court bench stated, “We find that in order to do justice, members of the petitioner Chattogram Mahanagar Chhinnamool Bastibashi Somonnoy Parishad may not be evicted from the land in question unless they have been rehabilitated elsewhere.”

Former president of Chattogram Mahanagar Sachetan Nagarik Committee, a civil society front in the city, Engineer Md Delwar Hossain Majumdar, blaming capitalism behind the slum debacle, said that profit-oriented projects have been taken up without providing rehabilitation to the displaced people living in the hills. 

“Legally and ethically, city corporations and district administrations must take responsibility for the slum dwellers,” he said.

On the issue, lawyer Manzil Morshed said, “There is no legal opportunity to build a government facility on the hills. If people are evicted only from that area (Jungle Salimpur) for the construction of government facilities, it will be discriminatory.

“Just as the government has taken projects for itself, so it must take projects for these poor people as well. We (the government) should not evict the slum dwellers without taking responsibility for their rehabilitation” he said, adding, failing to ensure accommodation translates into the violation of the constitutional responsibility of the state. 

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