Semi-Nomadic "River Gypsies" Of Bangladesh Giving Up - Rivers Increasingly Unnavigable - AFP

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At the end of every year, after the monsoon rains, Noor Hossain dismantles his houseboat on the Bangladeshi delta and heads to the mainland. This time he will not be coming back. Hossain is one of about 800,000 river gypsies, known locally as bedey, who for generations have lived on the nation's waterways between May and December, and on land for the rest of the year.

But now he has decided to give up his nomadic lifestyle because he says the rivers are increasingly erratic and impossible to navigate -- which experts attribute to effects of climate change and upstream development. For Hossain, who wears only a "lunghi" cloth wrapped around his waist, it means an end of the eight-month season during which he and the families of his four children paddled two rickety bamboo houseboats across the vast delta. "Many rivers, canals and streams are drying up. We can no longer get to remote areas and without that, we can't make a living," said Hossain, 48, who earns some income diving for jewellery lost by women bathing.

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Bangladesh's Inland Water Transport Authority says that today just 16,000 kilometres of waterways are navigable during the rainy seasons and 6,000 kilometres in the dry months from November to April. International scientists believe that Bangladesh -- through which the mighty Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers flow into the sea -- is one of the countries worst affected by climate change.

Government river expert Muhammad Imdadul Huq said that increased pollution and changing weather patterns, including unpredictable rains, were the main reasons why rivers were suffering. "This year we barely had any rain during June. We almost had a drought until heavy rain finally arrived in August. The weather is definitely changing and inconsistent rain -- heavy one month, dry the next -- affects our waterways," Huq said. Many rivers and streams are also drying up because of human extraction of water, large-scale dumping of industrial waste and unplanned building of hundreds of dams, he added.

EDIT

http://www.terradaily.com/2007/090918025329.xvmqknzd.html

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1. When the rivers run dry

Fred Pearce published a book by that title a couple of years ago. It's worth reading. The problem is worse than we know.