Why River Pollution Still Pays in Dhaka?

A government survey presented in Dhaka on 13 August identified 224 waste-discharge outlets connected to the Buriganga and Turag rivers, 166 along the Buriganga and 58 along the Turag. The figure should be read carefully: an outlet is a discharge point, not necessarily a single factory, and the government has said it will now identify the establishments connected to those outlets. The real significance of the finding, however, lies elsewhere. Bangladesh has known for years that untreated industrial effluent, sewage and poorly managed waste are poisoning the waterways around Dhaka. In February 2025, the Department of Environment served final notices on 2,046 factories in Dhaka, Gazipur, Narayanganj and Narsingdi, instructing them to keep their effluent treatment plants (ETP) operating continuously and warning of legal action for non-compliance. Yet 18 months later, another survey is identifying discharge points, and the government is again stressing ETP operation. That sequence suggests Dhaka’s river crisis is no longer primarily a matter of information shortage. The harder problem lies between knowing where pollution comes from and ensuring that those responsible have sufficient reason to stop it.

That problem becomes clearer in the World Bank’s January 2026 appraisal of the Metro Dhaka Water Security and Resilience Program. It estimates that more than 7,000 factories discharge about 2,400 million litres of untreated industrial effluent into rivers and canals each day. More importantly, the appraisal links poor compliance with effluent-treatment standards to weak enforcement and to the perception that rivers and canals offer a low-cost means of disposing of waste. This is where river pollution becomes an economic problem as much as an environmental one. Wastewater treatment requires investment, electricity, chemicals and maintenance. If a business can reduce those costs by inadequately treating its wastewater while the risk or cost of punishment remains low, non-compliance can become financially attractive. The savings remain private, while much of the damage is borne by the public through degraded water, environmental loss and health risks. In economic terms, this is a negative externality: the cost of production does not fully reflect the cost of pollution.

The same World Bank appraisal cites an earlier estimate that puts the environmental, health and economic costs associated with river pollution in Dhaka at about $2.83 billion a year. The central issue is therefore not simply whether ETPs exist, but whether the economic and regulatory consequences of not using them are strong enough to change behaviour.

It would nevertheless be wrong to reduce the crisis to irresponsible factories. Dhaka’s wastewater problem is also a failure of public infrastructure and institutional capacity. According to the World Bank, only about 20 per cent of Dhaka residents are connected to a piped sewerage system, and another 2 per cent have access to functional faecal-sludge management; more than 80 per cent of wastewater and sewage consequently enters interconnected waterways untreated. The institutional arrangement is also fragmented. The Department of Environment regulates pollution, while Dhaka WASA, city corporations and several other national agencies have separate responsibilities for sanitation, drainage, waste management and river management. The World Bank appraisal says the Department of Environment faces limited monitoring resources, shortages of trained personnel, and difficulties in consistently applying legal remedies. The current government has itself acknowledged the coordination problem and decided to establish an inter-agency mechanism for pollution control around Dhaka’s rivers. The test will be whether coordination produces measurable reductions in discharge rather than another set of meetings and plans.

There is at least a potentially stronger enforcement model now on the table. In February, the World Bank approved $370 million in financing for the Metro Dhaka Water Security and Resilience Program, covering sanitation, solid waste management, institutional strengthening and water pollution reduction. The programme includes an Internet of Things-based real-time pollution-monitoring system, water-quality stations, and public disclosure of pollution levels at selected critical locations, including industrial effluent outlets. It also provides for more audits, inspections and GIS-based databases of pollution sources. If implemented properly, that could change the enforcement equation. A periodic inspection shows what happened on one day; continuous data can reveal whether discharge continues after officials leave. Public disclosure can make it possible to ask specific questions: which outlet exceeded standards, which establishment was connected to it, what action followed, and whether the pollution stopped. Cleaner production can also make commercial sense in some cases. A World Bank-supported project at Fakir Knitwears involved a $1.7 million investment to upgrade its ETP and reuse treated water. The World Bank reports that the system enables the annual reuse of 438,000 cubic metres of water, returns around 1.2 million litres per day to production, and has a reported payback period of one year. One factory cannot establish a universal model, but it shows that pollution control and commercial incentives need not always be at odds.

The 224 outlets should be treated as the start of an accountability process, not the end of another survey. The immediate task is to trace discharge points to their sources, distinguish industrial effluent from municipal sewage, measure what is being released, and make both the findings and subsequent action visible. Factories required to operate treatment systems cannot be deemed compliant simply because an ETP has been installed; the Department of Environment’s 2025 notices explicitly required continuous operation. At the same time, industry cannot be the sole answer to rivers receiving vast quantities of untreated municipal wastewater. The state must enforce industrial standards while improving sanitation, waste management and regulatory capacity. Compliance must become more predictable, non-compliance more costly, monitoring more continuous, and responsibility easier to trace. Until the incentives and institutions behind pollution change, the country may keep mapping a problem it has already diagnosed while the rivers remain much the same.
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The writer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at IUBAT and is currently on study leave, residing in Oslo, Norway