Mohammad Suman does not need a weather report to know the tide has turned. He feels it in the grey, gritty slurry swirling around his ankles.
The 50-year-old had to spend all his Saturday afternoon armed with a weary broom, desperately pushing out the remnants of a flood that, just hours earlier, had turned his living room into a reservoir in the Badurtala locality of Chattogram, the commercial capital of the country.
“The water leaves eventually,” Suman says, gesturing toward the oily film coating his furniture and the contaminated water tank beneath his feet. “But the filth stays. The disease stays. And the fear? That never leaves.”
Suman is one of thousands of “climate hostages” in the port city.
Following a day of relentless rain on April 28, 2026, the city’s pulse slowed to a crawl as hubs like Muradpur, Sholashahar, Prabartak Crossing, and Chawkbazar became stagnant lagoons.
While officials in air-conditioned offices debate the precise terminology of the crisis, the city’s most vulnerable are left to sweep away the wreckage of their livelihoods.
The semantic war: ‘Waterlogging’ vs ‘deluge’
In the corridors of power, the crisis has been reduced to a war of words.
While Prime Minister Tarique Rahman expressed rare public regret in parliament, State Minister for Local Government Mir Shah Alam concluded after a fact-finding mission that the situation was not “waterlogging,” but merely “deluge.”
For 60-year-old Jhinuk Pal, who recently built a two-foot-high concrete wall at her front door in Chawkbazar to get rid of water congestion, such distinctions are a cruel irony. “For over a decade, the rain has been our enemy,” she says. “We are building walls inside our own homes just to survive. We don’t care what they call it; we care that every dark cloud brings terror.”
The Tk14,000 crore question
The scale of the response mirrors the scale of the crisis. Three major projects, costing roughly Tk14,000 crore, are under way to protect Chattogram city that depends largely on the Karnaphuli River, which connects to the Bay of Bengal.
The city’s 57 canals – the main drainage arteries – are being dredged, renovated and reinforced. The Chattogram Development Authority is overseeing work on 36 canals, while the City Corporation is responsible for the remaining 21.
Yet despite the massive investment, the drainage network remains clogged.
Chattogram Mayor Dr Shahadat Hossain, who heads the government-mandated coordination committee, admits the challenge is vast. Beyond the canals lie around 1,600 kilometres of primary and secondary drains, most choked with plastic waste from a population of seven million.
“The engineering is only half the battle,” the mayor said. “The cultural habits of waste disposal and the sheer volume of silt from the surrounding hills create a bottleneck that money alone cannot fix.”
The climate frontline: sinking while the sea rises
Chattogram’s vulnerability is rooted in geography. Much of the city lies just 2 to 4 metres above sea level, a narrow margin now shrinking under the combined pressure of rising seas and land subsidence.
The Bay of Bengal is rising at an estimated 4.73 millimetres a year, faster than the global average. At the same time, the flow of the Karnaphuli River is controlled by tidal patterns. When heavy rainfall coincides with high tide, the drainage system effectively reverses.
Engineer Subhash Barua, who has long monitored the city’s hydrology, believes current projects may be missing the bigger picture.
“Instead of debating definitions, we need a forensic review of these mega-projects,” he told TIMES. “If water drains in three hours instead of five, is that success? Not for the shopkeeper whose stock is ruined in thirty minutes. We must account for tidal influence and the reality that parts of this city now effectively function at sea level.”
The uncounted toll
Official figures remain largely silent on the financial devastation faced by the informal economy. When floodwater enters a motor garage in Badurtala, like the one run by Nezam Uddin, the damage goes far beyond a wet floor – it destroys tools, ruins engines and wipes out a week’s income.
“For the rich, rain is a season. For us, the monsoon is a threat to our hunger,” Nezam says.
There is no formal system to measure the cumulative losses suffered by thousands like Suman and Nezam.
Local Member of Parliament Abu Sufian acknowledged that “several thousand” people have been affected, though in a city of seven million, the real number is likely far higher.
As the 2026 monsoon approaches, residents find themselves caught between a rising sea and a slow-moving bureaucracy. If the Tk14,000 crore effort fails to deliver results, there are fears the city could slip from commercial powerhouse to something far more fragile.
