Bangladesh, ADB ink $250m loan deal for urban water supply

The Bangladeshi government has signed a loan agreement for 250 million U.S. dollars with the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to develop a surface water supply system benefiting more than 11 million people in Dhaka, where groundwater is depleting rapidly. Mohammad Mejbahuddin, secretary of Bangladesh's Economic Relations Division (ERD), and Kazuhiko Higuchi, country director for ADB's Bangladesh Resident Mission, signed the agreement on behalf of their respective sides Thursday. The concessional assistance will help expand the coverage and quality of water supplies, and develop a new raw water intake at the Meghna River, about 22 km east of Dhaka city, as well as a pumping station, said the Manila-based lender in a statement distributed in the loan signing ceremony. It said the assistance will also fund a water treatment plant, capable of handling 500 million liters a day, and install raw and treated water transmission pipelines. These initiatives, under the Dhaka Environmentally Sustainable Water Supply Project, are expected to reduce groundwater extraction by 150 million liters a day and help the city water authority raise its overall surface water supply to 1.9 billion liters a day by 2021, it added.