The news of losses of lives and properties caused by current flooding has stunned millions of Bangladeshis who are still unaffected. How rains swept away two children in Cox's Bazar is unbelievable to many, as the rhetoric of development and disaster preparedness had kept them captivated for years.
When floodwaters washed away homes in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, there was hardly any answer to how people could have been protected. When flash floods destroyed standing rice in the haor (marshy) region of Sunamganj and Kishoreganj days before harvesting, farmers said they were not told that the hilly onrush would damage their only crop.
Countrywide flooding is yet to happen this year, but people are scared of what they have not experienced regularly in recent decades, mainly due to the drying up of rivers. Because of barriers created by roads and other infrastructure, a new generation has grown unfamiliar with the inundation of floodplains, mostly farmland, common in this delta for centuries.
In Dhaka, where policymakers and powerful elites live, people were bewildered by waterlogging and gridlock that left them stranded on the streets for three to four hours this week.
"What has gone wrong?" sufferers and the media commonly asked, as we do soul-searching whenever there is a natural or man-made calamity.
Development -- the building of expensive infrastructure during the one and a half decades before 5 August 2024 -- should have solved flooding problems once and for all. In hindsight, everyone sees it is not the development people need.
Development became an excuse to prolong Sheikh Hasina's stay in power by subjugating people and undermining democratic institutions and values. Her Awami media cadres did not ask: if people do not have their say in national or local development, how can it serve them?
Now, beneficiaries and sycophants of the banned Awami League are highlighting her "planned" return to Bangladesh next December and talking about "future democracy", while a popularly elected government struggles to deal with the pitfalls of that development model, reflected in waterlogging in Dhaka and Chattogram and damage to property from rains and floods.
The Hasina regime's development model promoted "systematic corruption" and caused "institutional decay", among other abuses, resulting in the state's failure to prevent public suffering in times of need.
The Bangladesh Nationalist Party government of Prime Minister Tarique Rahman has inherited those problems, including development that harms the environment and patronises a relief culture. As a result, discussion of combating floods centres on distributing relief materials. Public servants struggle to support flood victims in remote areas as they need.
The previous government, along with its oligarchs and pillagers, grabbed open spaces, including rivers and canals, assuming waters would not come down from across the border to disrupt the development meant to generate money through project implementation and rent-seeking.
They made the normal -- the flow of river waters and the submersion of floodplains -- abnormal, and the opposite -- loss of river navigability and development without nature -- the new normal.
Even natural calamities and much-talked-about climate change became opportunities to make more money in the name of addressing them at high cost.
Unless this approach to development is reversed, there is little chance we will be able to live in this country sustainably. Cities will remain plagued by pollution, waterlogging, traffic congestion and chaos. Villages will also be filled with reckless infrastructure. The country will continue to lose arable land and adequate space to breathe.
However, we have come across interesting ideas to address the urban crisis, rural development challenges and ecological threats, but they have remained confined to discussion. Whenever disaster strikes -- cyclones, earthquakes, floods or war -- we become consumed with our future and seek immediate, short-term solutions until the next crisis arises.
Bangladesh's policymakers and multilateral development partners have long focused on poverty alleviation -- the multidimensional curse. Yet despite remarkable income growth since the 1990s, the country has failed to overcome a poverty of policymaking in pursuing sustainable development and sound governance.
The July-August 2024 revolution has offered a historic opportunity to change state management and put people at the centre of development for collective ownership and benefit. The current flooding may test the BNP government on whether such calamities can be addressed through long-term preparedness and development that truly serves the people.
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Khawaza Main Uddin is a journalist. He can be contacted at khawaza@gmail.com