Pinaki Roy

Government efforts to bring order to relief distribution in Rohingya camp areas are largely overwhelmed by the huge number of refugees.

Law enforcers are struggling to stop the spread of Rohingyas from registered as well as temporary camps as middlemen and locals are helping the refugees to settle outside the camps.

Tens of thousands of Rohingyas, who are staying either in the open or in makeshift tents by the Cox's Bazar-Teknaf highway, hardly have any drinking water and sanitation facilities.

It was an endless stream of Rohingyas crossing into Bangladesh from the strife-torn Rakhine State in Myanmar. Some had lost all their loved ones while others were lucky enough to escape with their family members.

Samir Uddin, who rushed to help the distressed throughout his life, has now grown so old that he can't even move on his own. Until

Hearing gunshots, Md Yunus realised that troops were closing in on their village. So he instantly ran towards a nearby hillock to hide

Nearly 70,000 Rohingya refugees have gathered at two newly built camps in Teknaf and Ukhia of Cox's Bazar as the old shelters in the district are already overcrowded. So far, an estimated 90,000 Rohingyas have arrived in Bangladesh in the wake of violence triggered by a Rohingya insurgent attack in Myanmar's Rakhine State on August 25.

Law enforcers rescued 19 bodies of Rohingya people, who had been fleeing violence in Myanmar, from the Bay of Bengal after the ill-equipped boats carrying them capsized yesterday.

It was around noon on Wednesday.

A few thousand Rohingya refugees entered Bangladesh yesterday slipping through the Rezu Aamtali border in Naikkhangchhari of Bandarban.

Several thousand Rohingyas from Myanmar, mostly women, children and elderly people, are waiting in no man's land along the Naikhyangchhari border to enter Bangladesh territory.

They are now on this side of the border. On the other side, they have homes, may be burnt down already. It's just several hundred metres away but they are too scared to go back. They left their villages on Saturday, a day after violence erupted in Rakhine State of Myanmar, according to Dil Mohammed, one of the refugees, who is from Dekibunia of Maungdaw.

Experts have expressed concern over the depleting Bengal tiger population in the Sundarbans as the number of tiger attacks in and around the mangrove forest has gone down significantly in recent years.

The quality of the Buriganga water in Dhaka improved to some extent after the tanneries of Hazaribagh were shut down recently. Tests by Department of Environment (DoE) say so and so do the people of the area.

At least nine rivers, including the Jamuna, Teesta, Dharla, Surma and the Kushiyara, are flowing above the danger level, but experts say that will neither worsen nor prolong the current flooding. However, there is a possibility of a fresh flood if it rains heavily in the northeastern states of neighbouring India, they add.

It was just a matter of time before a tragedy of this scale befell the country's hill region. The way people felled trees, cleared forest for commercial plantation and cultivation, and built houses on hill slopes in the Chittagong region, something disastrous was bound to happen, say experts.

Prof Dwijen Sharma, an eminent naturalist, said it would not be possible to stop the conflict between nature and development as long as capitalism controls everything.

A government dispatched experts' team reached Sunamganj yesterday to collect water samples from the haors there for lab test at the Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission to ascertain whether there is any radioactive materials in the waters.

Bangladesh experiences flash floods ever so often and farmers are no stranger to crop loss as a result. But the deaths of fish, frogs and fowls in their hundreds as an aftermath of such floods are a new phenomenon altogether.

Farmers in the northeastern backswamp are all too familiar with flash floods. Rice paddies grown just once a year in this vast haor remain at the mercy of nature. But thousands of growers in this wetland ecosystem had never experienced flash floods striking this early as in this season, completely destroying paddies in over one lakh hectares of land.