By SOMINI SENGUPTA
BEEL BHAINA, Bangladesh - The rivers that course down from the Himalayas and into this crowded delta flood low-lying paddies for several months, sometimes years, at a time. And they ferry mountains of silt and sand from far away upstream.
Most of that sediment washes out into the roiling Bay of Bengal. But an accidental discovery by desperate delta folk here may hold clues to how Bangladesh could harness some of that dark, rich Himalayan muck to protect itself against sea level rise and improve its farm economy.
Instead of allowing the silt to settle where it wants, Bangladesh has begun to channel it to where it is needed - to fill in shallow soup bowls of land prone to flooding, or to create new land off its long, exposed coast.
The efforts have been limited to small experimental patches, not uniformly promising, and there is still ample concern that a swelling sea could one day soon swallow parts of Bangladesh. But the emerging evidence suggests that a nation that many see as indefensible to the ravages of human-induced climate change could literally raise itself up.
“You can do a lot with the silt that these rivers bring,”said Bea M. ten Tusscher, the Dutch ambassador to Bangladesh. The Netherlands, accustomed to engineering its vulnerable lowlands, helps Bangladesh with water management projects.“Those are like little diamonds,”Ms. ten Tusscher said.“You have to use it.”
Skeptics say it is folly to expect silt accretion to save the country. Accretion happens slowly, over centuries, they argue.“If you have time to wait, it will happen,”said Atiq Rahman of the Bangladesh Center for Advanced Studies. His country, he added, does not have time to wait.
The silt-trapping experiment has yielded tentative but visible gains here in Beel Bhaina, a low-lying 240-hectare soup bowl of land on the banks of the Hari River, a tributary of the Ganges, about 90 kilometers upstream from the Bay of Bengal.
A devastating flood 10 years ago left this soup bowl - a“beel”in Bengali - inundated with water that reached above Abdul Lateef’s head. No paddy could grow, recalled Mr. Lateef, now 56. Houses went under. The river was so silted it hardly moved.
Desperate to drain the water, Mr. Lateef and his neighbors punched a hole through the mud embankment that encircled the bowl. The water rushed out. Then the high tide began to haul in sediment, and the bowl filled with silt.
When the chief engineer of the local water board, Sheikh Nurul Ala, came to measure it, he saw that in four years, Beel Bhaina had risen by as much as a meter. Today, it is a quilt of green and gray square patches of paddy, cut by square ponds to cultivate fish and shrimp. Mr. Lateef collects a harvest of rice and farms shrimp, the most lucrative cash crop.
The simple silt-trapping engineering here was not designed as an adaptation to sea rise, but Mr. Ala is convinced that it can offer some protection.“Some benefit it will provide, I think, by raising the beels,”he said.“The problem will not be as severe for the land we can raise.”
A bowl of low-lying land on the Hari River in Beel Bhaina, Bangladesh, was filled with silt after a flood. It is now used to grow crops and for fish farming.
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