People carrying out drives to shut down illegal brick kilns often feel that these may resume operations after some time. Adopting many strategies, these usually returned to business, they said.
Often the brick kilns douse the fire before a drive. To reduce air pollution, mobile courts carried out drives around Dhaka. On Nov 26, The High Court ordered the closure of all unauthorized brick kilns.
Environmentalists say that brick kilns cannot be established within residential, commercial, agricultural and city corporation areas.
If the law is to be strictly implemented, then most kilns have to be shut down because there is a settlement within 1km of most kilns. The Department of Environment (DoE) said in a report last March that 58 percent of the air pollution was from brick kilns. In the last five years, the number of kilns rose by 59 percent. There could be around 1,302 kilns in Dhaka, Narayanganj, Manikganj, Munshiganj districts.
Only Dhaka had 487 kilns. DoE has rejected the application of 26 kilns. Deputy Director of the DoE, Khalid Hassan, said: “After the high court order, we shut down 13 kilns and extracted Tk 1.3 million as fines.”
On the order of district administrator MM Ferdous, 10 kilns were shut down but the drive had to be carried on, he added.
Reportedly, there are 352 brick kilns in Gazipur of which 274 are illegal.
Deputy Director of DoE in Narayanganj, Sayeed Anwar, said: “After the HC order, 53 kilns were shut down with a fine of Tk 9.3 million.”
Head of Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers’ Association (BELA), Syeda Rezwana Hassan, said: “It’s natural that those who run brick kilns will adopt cunning methods to avoid the law and so the drive must continue. We must also stop using burnt bricks because the kilns remain since there is a demand for burnt bricks.”
A regular monitoring needed to be ensured by the district administration and this could not be done by the DoE alone, added Rezwana.
Bangla Tribune correspondents from Gazipur, Narayanganj, Munshiganj and Manikganj provided inputs to the report.