Desk Report
Oniket Research Group
The indigenous communities of Muralipara in Rangamati live beneath hills that could collapse at any moment (the daily star). For Chingchoyai Marma, a mother of four, the last monsoon was so terrifying that her entire family fled to her in law’s house for two weeks, returning only after the rain stopped. Even now, every rainfall renews the fear.
This is not an extraordinary story. It is the ordinary reality for the Marma and Tonchongya communities who inhabit one of the area’s most vulnerable to landslides in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Their experience reveals a deeply troubling pattern of environmental vulnerability, institutional neglect, and structural inequality that demands critical examination.
Sustainability Under Erosion
The environmental conditions facing Muralipara reflect a broader crisis of sustainability in the hill districts. When communities must rely on bamboo ritual structures and the recitation of “Dahe Tang Pora,” meaning “Mountain, please do not collapse,” to protect themselves from landslides, the situation speaks volumes about the absence of modern disaster mitigation infrastructure. These rituals, including the annual Chumlang Puja presided over by the village elder, demonstrate remarkable cultural resilience, but they cannot substitute for engineering interventions, early warning systems, or structural reinforcement of unstable slopes. Sustainability, in any meaningful sense, requires that communities are not merely surviving through ritual faith but are supported by systems that reduce material risk to manageable levels.
The persistence of landslide vulnerability also points to environmental degradation that compounds over time. Unregulated land use, deforestation, and poorly planned construction on hill slopes have accelerated erosion across the hill tracts. When Chingchoyai Marma noticed a crack on the hill above her house, she responded with a bamboo ritual. That crack, however, is a symptom of geological instability that cultural practice alone cannot arrest. Each monsoon weakens the terrain further, and each cycle of displacement, temporary relocation, and return deepens the precarity of these communities. Sustainability is not merely an environmental concept; it is a social contract, and for the indigenous people of Rangamati, that contract has been systematically unfulfilled.
Regional Equity and Structural Exclusion
The lived reality of Muralipara’s residents exposes a stark deficit in regional equity. Limited land availability and financial hardship prevent families from relocating permanently. They remain tied to hazardous hillsides not by choice but by structural constraint. Indigenous communities in the Chittagong Hill Tracts have historically faced dispossession, militarisation, and marginalisation in national policy. The fact that, in the absence of state protection, these communities have developed their own cultural practices for coping with risk is testament to their ingenuity, but it is also an indictment of governance failures. When citizens must invent their own disaster response mechanisms because the state provides none, equity has collapsed.
Regional equity demands that a child growing up on a hilltop in Rangamati enjoys the same reasonable assurance of physical safety as a child in Dhaka. The current gap is not incremental; it is foundational. National disaster management frameworks, infrastructure investment, and governance attention remain concentrated in urban centres and plains districts, while the hill tracts receive episodic attention only after catastrophes occur. This is not a resource problem alone; it is a priority problem rooted in whose lives the state considers worth protecting.
Reforms to Confront the Crisis
First, the government must establish a dedicated hill tracts landslide mitigation authority with a mandate to conduct geological surveys, identify high risk zones, and implement slope stabilisation measures. This authority should operate with guaranteed multiyear funding and be required to consult indigenous communities at every stage, recognising that local knowledge of terrain and seasonal patterns complements technical expertise.
Second, a comprehensive resettlement and housing safety programme must be developed for families living in acutely vulnerable zones. Resettlement cannot replicate the failures of past programmes in the hill tracts, which undermined indigenous land rights and cultural integrity. Any relocation must be voluntary, culturally informed, and accompanied by land tenure guarantees, permanent housing built to suitable standards, and access to livelihoods and services comparable to what families would leave behind.
Third, early warning systems must be installed across landslide prone areas in Rangamati and the broader hill districts, with communication methods adapted to linguistically diverse indigenous populations. Warnings delivered only in Bengali exclude communities whose primary languages are Marma, Tonchongya, Chakma, or others. Multilingual, community-based dissemination networks should be built alongside technological systems.
Fourth, environmental regulation in the hill tracts must be strengthened and enforced. Unauthorised hill cutting, deforestation, and construction must carry genuine legal consequences. The current pattern of regulatory weakness, where violations proceed unchecked until a disaster forces brief official attention, is unsustainable and unjust.
Fifth, regional equity must be embedded as a governing principle in all infrastructure and disaster management budgeting. Funding allocations should be weighed up to address the disproportionate vulnerability of hill tract districts, not distributed by population density alone. Equity means recognising that remoteness and historical marginalisation require greater, not less, investment per capita.
The mountain must not fall. That plea, whispered in Marma across the hillsides of Muralipara, should echo through every corridor of power where decisions about these communities are made. Rituals sustain the spirit; only sustained governance can sustain the body and the land.
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