Water saves our lives, the same water takes lives too!

The northeast region of Bangladesh is facing one of the worse floods in history. That means people who had no idea what to do during a flood and no means to save them are fighting with it. That means a total collapse of a region for months. That means much more than these. Bangladesh is one of the most flood-prone countries in the world. Floods have huge costs for Bangladesh, both in terms of lives, property, livelihoods, and development gains lost.

This time, we are not the victim, we are only seeing this in news. But the struggle of people, their fight with nature (I'm not sure if I should call it that because this is almost like a manmade flood) is breaking our hearts.

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Withdrawal water from transboundary rivers during dry seasons and releasing excess water during monsoon. This is what happens every year. Being downstream geographically, we don't have much to do. Many say that water diplomacy should be the heart of all diplomacy in Bangladesh. But we all know, it's never possible to win an unbalanced battle when you have no power.

I sometimes think about the whole situation deeply. Maybe we will choose to do the same if we are in the opposite position. Because why not? We are powerful, we have control over the resources. Don't we waste a good amount of water every single day? On the other hand, in this same city, there are many many areas where they don't have access to drinkable water or any water at all. Water saves our lives, the same water takes lives too!

Even living in the same city doesn't make us much more compassionate or aware of people's right to have access to water and we are talking about nations!!

I don't know how could we solve this flood problem. What we do from our end is build a better flood management system, increase our capacity to help support during floods, and establish alternative plans and systems to fight them.

Because it's almost a waste of time and effort to come to a solution as a nation at the international level. The water treaty and our right to water are only in pen and paper and this is how it will be. It's better to look at what we can do from our end.

We help and support the flood victim, we pray for them. That's all we can do for now...