Review of planning approach for rehabilitation of water development projects in Bangladesh

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.