Local influential people have set up an automatic brick factory on agricultural land at Gheor upazila in Manikganj district. The automatic factory has the capacity to make two lakhs bricks per day.
Issuing threat to the farmers, influential people has been collecting soil from cultivable land from different places under Gheor and Shibaloy upazilas of the district under the very nose of the local administration since long. The soil collected for the arable land is being sent to the automatic factory to make bricks. Farmers of ten villages in Gheor and Shibaloy upazilas have already sold the soil of their many land, according media reports.
Manikganj deputy commissioner office asked Gheor Upazila administration to take immediate action against the automatic brick factory. However, the upazila administration did not pay any heed to the order. The brick factory is destroying the arable land alongside polluting the environment.
The brick factory is destroying
the arable land alongside
polluting the environment
Illegal soil extraction continues unabated in the two upazilas, posing a serious threat to farmlands in the vicinity, despite nation-wide restrictions on the practice. Residents of several villages in the two upazilas are worried over illegal soil extraction and claim that their repeated complaints to the authorities concerned against the soil mafia, powerful syndicates, that illegally lift soil and sell it to brick kilns in the past couple of years have only fallen on deaf ears. Some residents even allege that the illegal trade continues in the two upazilas because of local political and administrative connivance.
In the span of a decade, around 4 lakh acres of arable land have passed into the non-agricultural sector, according to the Agriculture Census 2019. The agricultural land of the country has decreased to 186.81 lakh acres, which was 190.97 lakh acres in the previous census in 2008, notes the latest government census.
All these lands are going into the hands of non agriculture sector like brick kilns, housing, industrialisation under the very nose of the authorities concerned. By cutting earth for brick kilns and filling croplands, residential dwellings, roads, other infrastructures like high-rise buildings, factories, industries, hotels, resorts and other business establishments are being built there indiscriminately across the country.
If this illegal practice is not stopped immediately, the country will face serious problem in ensuring food security for its growing population in the future. We are concerned over this trend as our country largely depends on agriculture. The authorities concerned should focus more on the protection of the arable land for our food security.