Tannery owners flouted the legal notice served to them by the Bangladesh Small and Cottage Industries Corporation to relocate the tanneries to Savar from the city’s Hazaribagh in 72 hours that expired on Saturday. Supreme Court lawyer Shahidul Islam, who served the legal notice to the tanners on behalf of the BSCIS, admitted that no tanner responded to the legal notices as yet. He said he had no further instruction on what to do following the tanners’ failure to respond to the notice. The legal notices stated that BSCIC would forcefully evict the tanners by snapping gas, power and water connections to their industries and cancel the allotment of land given to them to run the tannery, if they failed to relocate in the deadline. Meanwhile, the errant tanners said they could not respond to the notices for relocation as they found the 72-hour deadline ‘unacceptable.’ They said they needed at least two months to complete the task. The tanners alleged the government had failed complete the infrastructure at the new site, especially in setting up the effluent treatment plant. Project director and joint secretary Abdul Qayyum said they had already constructed an effluent treatment plant but could not run it as there was no production in the area which would lead to effluent release. There are about 195 tanneries which are dumping untreated wastes in the River Buriganga causing the destruction of the city’s main river. The BSCIC served legal notices to 28 out of 195 tanners and planned to send legal notices to other tanners phase by phase. The legal notices said the tanners had been buying time with the intent of not relocating, since BSCIC allotted them 10,000 square feet land in Savar on April 29, 2007 following a 2001 High Court verdict to relocate the tanneries. BSCIC has already constructed all infrastructure in Savar to run the tanneries, said the notice. It said that the tanners were yet to relocate their industries in two years although BSCIC reminded them 19 times from February 6, 2014 to December 17, 2015 to shift the tanneries.
