A POLICY attention on ensuring access to basic sanitation facilities has left other relevant concerns such as faecal waste management and water and sanitation infrastructure maintenance unattended for decades. Experts, entrepreneurs, academics and development partners at a conference in Dhaka on February 25 called for addressing gaps in sanitation facilities. They have said that an estimated 230 tonnes of faecal waste end up in Dhaka鈥檚 open water bodies every day. Fragile sanitation practices have contributed significantly to environmental pollution and posed serious health risks to children and marginalised communities. In 2021, a World Health Organisation and UNICEF report showed that at least 61.7 million people in Bangladesh did not have basic hygiene, which is close to 3 per cent of the global burden. The report also said 68.3 million people had inadequate access to safe drinking water and 103 million lacked safely managed sanitation. More than 50 per cent of the population or more than 85 million people, as Water Aid says, do not have access to basic sanitation.
Water and sanitation access remains a challenge in hard-to-reach areas and urban slums. Experts blame the lack of budgetary allocation for the sector and management failure in maintaining water and sanitation facilities. The water, sanitation and hygiene sector saw a聽22.5 per cent decline聽in budgetary allocation in the 2025 fiscal year than in the previous year. Despite the high need in rural, char, hilly and coastal areas, urban areas have received a relatively higher allocation in recent years. Local government authorities, as people have repeatedly complained, spend money on deep tube well or latrine installation but rarely allocate a budget for long-term maintenance. Extremely poor people living in Ashrayan and Abasan projects have talked about their sufferings from an acute shortage of drinking water as the government provides no support for maintenance. Meanwhile, diarrhoeal diseases remain a significant public health concern, with an estimated 5.0 per cent prevalence of diarrhoea among children under five.聽Experts in the sector, therefore, are not wrong when they say that successive governments have not recognised the importance of access to hygiene in attaining development goals.
The government should, therefore, reconsider its policy for the water and sanitation sector with a special focus on gaps in sanitation facilities and the needs of the hard-to-reach areas. In doing so, it should increase budgetary allocation for the sector and address the management failure that resources in this sector are generally spent on installation but not maintenance. In order to achieve universal access to safely managed hygiene facilities, it should introduce advanced technology for waste management.