Abstract:
Over last 30 years about 440 small, medium and large water development projects
have been implemented in Bangladesh. According to a recent survey about 200 of
them need rehabilitation for not serving the purpose for which these were
executed. Towards this Bangladesh Water Development Board (BWDB) has taken up for
rehabilitation of about 80 projects in the first phase. Feasibility reports were
prepared for 21 projects in 1988. The present study was taken up to review these
feasibility reports so as to develop an understanding of the changes in planning
approach needed at the rehabilitation phase. This was to be achieved by comparing
the approaches adopted at the initial phase with that of rehabilitation phase.
The study also reviewed available' evaluation reports that have identified
deficiencies in operation and maintenance of already completed projects in order
to establish the issues that need to be addressed to in a rehabilitation
programme. Then an in-depth evaluation was carried out" for three selected
projects with the help of a structured questionnaire, field visits and study of
relevant documents. The three projects were selected to represent three different
project types namely, early flood protection and drainage improvements, salinity
control and drainage improvement, and flood protection, drainage and on farm
irrigation management.
The main findings bf this study is that the planners tried to restore the
original projects by rehabilitating the damaged structures, repairing the
embankments and re-excavating the canals etc. In some cases new structures have
been provided to ful fir some of the original objectives that were not made
earlier. There has not been significant change in planning approach between
initial and rehabilitation phases. Many aspects of planning which escaped the
attention of the original planners e.g. the impacts on the environment, on
project out siders, on open water fisheries, on boat communications etc. have
also been over looked in this stage of planning. It has been observed that ,the
socio economic aspects of the project beneficiaries have neither not been
considered nor any remedy to their needs have been proposed in the rehabilitation
prciposaIs,
The absence of perticipation of the beneficiaries in operation and maintenance
'of the projects and also in the project planning and execution continues as
before. This may lead these projects to another rehabilitation stage in future
as same factors leading to rehabilitation prevail. However, the experiments in
some projects to improve, operation and maintenance by forming Embankment
Maintenance Group (EMG)and Structure Maintenance Group (SMG)with the local
people is an encouraging step.
