Editorial
Public hearing on DAP
Casual approach to city development -- again!
WE cannot help being skeptic about the public hearing launched by Rajuk, some five weeks ago, on the draft final reports of Detailed Area Plan (DAP) offering a participatory outlet to the city dwellers to be associated with the planning process for the capital city's well-rounded development. In theory, the idea is good; but in practice, it looks headed for a debacle unless of course it is reorganised into an effective interface between the development planner and the city dweller.
The public hearing has until December 2 to expire. And already it has become a listless, fragmentary effort yielding very little by way of obtaining useful public inputs to revise the plan to address city dwellers' concerns.
Just how important is the DAP? Very, for it is the operational plan of specifics pertaining to implementation of Dhaka Metropolitan Development Plan (DMDP), popularly known as Dhaka master plan. The DMDP launched as early as in 1992 remains a non-starter to this day -- thanks to lack of a DAP.
Basically the flawed approach to DAP lay in the consultants' failure to consult the public at the time of field survey thereby ruling out any meaningful public participation subsequently. Involving local public at that stage could have eliminated incongruities in the survey reports and physical feature maps.
Rather than inviting individuals through newspaper advertisement to air their views, civic bodies, community leaders and public representatives should have been involved in the hearing process.
It is alleged that Rajuk has little maneuverability in recognising the flaws and anomalies in the final draft report and amending proposals contained in it 'as it has already paid up most of the fees of the consultants'. How could they have done so? The other allegation is equally serious: according to the experts, the DAP is poised to serve certain coterie interests including that of housing developers.
All these allegations need to be gone into and ways and means devised to attune the DAP to the best practices in town planning to perfect it.
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