Call to ensure safe water, sanitation for slum dwellers

Call to ensure safe water, sanitation for slum dwellers

RAJSHAHI, May 31: speakers at a discussion here on Tuesday observed that ensuring safe drinking water, sanitation, health, housing and education to the slum dwellers can be the best ways of improving their living and livelihood conditions.
Disadvantaged and underprivileged populations in the urban areas face various water and airborne diseases as they suffer a lot due to constraints of safe drinking water, drain and sanitation. So, city corporations and non-government entities concerned should come forward and work together to address the problem, they said.
The views were expressed at a pre-budget discussion by some public representatives and community leaders who urged the authorities concerned to keep for special allocation for the population in the annual budget and international donor agencies to extend their furthermore cooperation in this field.
BRAC on behalf of its Urban Development Programme (UDP) hosted the meeting at Nanking Darbar Hall Chinese Restaurant in the city. Panel Mayor of Rajshahi City Corporation (RCC) Shariful Islam addressed the meeting as chief guest, while its secretary Moshiur Rahman was in the chair. RCC Ward councilors Towhidul Haque and Nazrul Islam, UDP Programme Manager Sayef Iqbal and District Coordinator Mohsin Reza also spoke.
The meeting was told that 69,890 people living in different slum areas in the city have got the scope of improving their lives and livelihood conditions amid intervention of the UDP taken for reducing their multi-dimensional poverty and deprivation. Forty of the beneficiary households have got houses with the initiative.