Road through Maheshkhali reserved forest: A standoff between law and development

An excavator bites into the hillside, and labourers move behind it carrying away the loosened earth in baskets, load after load, all day. That soil becomes a road base. The scene is unfolding at JM Ghat in Shaplapur Union, on Maheshkhali, where a narrow 1.8-metre dirt path through hill forest is being turned into a paved, 5.5-metre road running roughly 4.8 kilometres to Kalarmarchhara.

Building this road is illegal. Under Forest Department records, the land it cuts through, Hill Mouza No. 12, was declared a reserved forest back in 1957, under Section 20 of the Forest Act. It should not be under construction at all. Yet the excavation goes on.

The Local Government Engineering Department (LGED) is building it anyway, with government funding and support from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), at a cost of Tk22.37 crore. 

The Forest Department, which legally owns this land, says the forest shelters barking deer, spotted deer, monkeys, capped langurs, pythons and the endangered hill tortoise, and that a paved road would put all of them at risk.

"Based on publicly available information from relevant authorities, JICA understands that the road does not pass through any of the 58 legally protected areas listed by the Forest Department," said Erina Mahmud, Communication Officer at JICA.

"JICA requires all activities financed under its assistance to comply with its Guidelines for Environmental and Social Considerations and applicable laws and regulations of Bangladesh," Erina said. She noted that the executing agency is responsible for project implementation and compliance, while JICA monitors the project under its established procedures and frameworks.

LGED and the Forest Department have been at odds for a while now. When the local MP, Alamgir Mohammad Mahfuzullah Farid, wrote asking the Forest Department to cooperate, they wrote back and refused, stating plainly that there is no legal scope for the project. Construction continued regardless.

The courts have not settled it either. A High Court stay order halted the work for two months. Then the Appellate Division stayed that stay order, and the excavators went back to the hillside. Legally, the question is still open. Physically, the road is already 3.7 kilometres of the way through forest land.

However, for the people who actually live along that route, the legal question barely registers next to the practical one. 

Ruksana Khatun has spent years watching neighbours make long detours for things that should be simple, a school run, a hospital visit, a trip to market, and she is tired of it.

"Look, you can see for yourselves what the roads are like here," she said. "We already struggle with our daily activities, and whenever there is an emergency, we have to travel a long way around to get anywhere else. Going to school, college, the market or hospital is extremely difficult. During the rainy season, it becomes almost impossible to travel."

An excavator cuts into a hillside as labourers carry away loosened soil to build a 5.5-metre-wide paved road from JM Ghat to Kalarmarchhara.

Her frustration is not hard to understand looking at the map. Kalarmarchhara sits close enough to Shaplapur that the current 20-kilometre detour feels almost designed to punish anyone in a hurry, and for a pregnant woman in labour or a farmer racing a monsoon downpour, that detour is not an inconvenience. It is the difference between reaching help and not.

Her neighbour Ismail Molla takes the argument a step further, dismissing the Forest Department's warnings as overstated. Nothing about this road, he insists, needs to cost the forest anything.

"You should go and see the whole area yourselves," he said. "You will see that none of this needs to happen."

It is a striking thing to hear from him, because his own home undercuts the argument. The houses, shops and betel-leaf gardens lining both sides of the proposed route, the very settlement Ismail and Ruksana call home, are themselves recorded by the Forest Department as illegal occupation of reserved land. Asked whether their land was legally registered, both hesitated before answering, in a way that said more than the words that followed.

"We have been here for a long time," they said. "It is all government land. We don't have any land documents, but nobody says anything to us."

A visit to the site, however, did not fully support Ismail's claim that nothing needed to be disturbed. Concrete sections of the new road, considerably wider than the original 1.8-metre track, were already visible at regular intervals, cutting through terrain the Forest Department says required real removal of trees and soil to build.

Forest Department data puts more than 4,000 people already living illegally inside the 18,286 acres of reserved forest around Shaplapur, on land that was never theirs to claim. In June, the department warned the local MP that a paved road through the middle of it would not ease that pressure. It would invite more of it.

The law, at least, is not vague on any of this. The Forest and Tree Conservation Act 2026, brought in among the ordinances of the interim government after February's national election, restricts natural forest land to purposes consistent with conservation. 

For the people who actually live along that route, the legal question barely registers next to the daily hardship caused by the poor road conditions.

Other forest land can only be repurposed where there is genuine national necessity, no alternative exists, an independent environmental and social impact assessment has been done, compensatory afforestation is arranged, and the Cabinet itself signs off. None of that appears to have happened here.

The National Forest Policy and prior court directives already prohibit building structures inside reserved forests, and Article 18A of the Constitution commits the state to protecting forests, wildlife and biodiversity for future generations, not clearing them for a shortcut. 

Set against that framework, a Tk22.37 crore paved road pushed through without Cabinet approval or an environmental assessment is not a grey area. It is a straightforward breach, proceeding in plain sight because two court orders have cancelled each other out and left a legal vacuum in their place.

None of that features in LGED's own account of why the road exists. Ask Upazila Engineer Boni Amin, and the answer is closer to a spreadsheet than a legal brief. It is simply one road among many, catalogued and numbered like any other, its purpose measured in kilometres saved rather than trees lost.

"This road is included in our ID system," he said. "To improve connectivity, we identify specific roads in every district, upazila and union across the country, and each of these roads is assigned a number." Once finished, he added, it would cut the distance between Shaplapur and the neighbouring union from 20 kilometres down to four and a half.

That framing, connectivity as a self-evident good, is exactly what environmentalists say hides the real cost. A shorter route sounds like pure benefit until you ask what land it passes through and who else it makes it easier to reach. Abu Bakar, general secretary of Bangladesh Poribesh Andolon's (BAPA) Maheshkhali chapter, sees a road built to reward people who broke the rules first, not to serve a community stopped short by geography.

"Those living inside the forest will benefit if the road is built," he said. "Illegal houses and shops have already been established inside the forest. If this road is constructed, even the remaining forest will no longer be protected."

That warning carries particular weight coming from inside the Forest Department itself, where enforcement has already run up against its own limits. Milton Chandra Sarker, a beat officer with the Chattogram Coastal Forest Division's Shaplapur field office, describes a department that has done everything short of physically stopping the machines. It has objected. It has filed a case. The work has continued regardless.

"Under forest law, there is no scope for constructing any kind of structure or infrastructure inside a reserved forest," he said. "The Forest Department stopped the work by objecting to it, but construction is continuing by force."

Alamgir Kabir, BAPA's general secretary, makes the case that Maheshkhali is not just another patch of forest to weigh against a road. It is the country's only hilly coastal island, and once its forest is gone, there is no equivalent left anywhere in Bangladesh to point to instead.

He is also openly sceptical that the loudest support for the project is as grassroots as it looks, suggesting local voices are being used to carry an argument that serves the MP's own political interest more than it serves any commuter's daily grind. 

And once the paving is finished, he warns, enforcement gets harder, not easier, because a paved road does not just carry buses and ambulances. It carries land buyers, resort developers and anyone else who was previously kept out by 4.8 kilometres of unpaved forest track.