When the divider becomes farmland on Bangladesh’s busiest highway
Cultivating and harvesting crops on the divider of a highway is illegal. Yet, along nearly 70 kilometres of the Dhaka-Chattogram Highway, one of the country’s busiest and most accident-prone ones, that is exactly what has been happening for years
Ashraf Ali has a fruit stall in Shuklal Hat, and behind it, a strip of land he does not own but has come to depend on. It runs along roughly 200 feet of the concrete divider splitting the Dhaka-Chattogram Highway, right beside his house, and for three years now, it has fed his family and, some weeks, his cash box too. He never sought anyone's permission. For three years, nobody asked him to.
"The land is right beside my house, so it is convenient for us. We can grow vegetables for our own use and sell whatever is left at the market. It is useful for our family," he said.
"We do not have much land of our own, so using this space helps us. We can grow vegetables here without spending much money, and it gives us something to eat and sell."
Cultivating and harvesting crops on the middle of a national highway, on the very divider meant to keep opposing traffic apart, is illegal. It should not be endorsed by anyone, not by the residents doing it, not by local officials looking away, and certainly not by the department that owns the land. Yet along nearly 70 kilometres of the Dhaka-Chattogram Highway, that is exactly what Ali and many others like him have been doing, for years, in full view.
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Along nearly 70 kilometres of road between Sitakunda and Mirsharai, in Chattogram, the Roads and Highways Department (RHD)'s carefully planted trees and shrubs, put there years ago as part of a beautification drive, have been cut down and replaced with spinach, red amaranth, jute leaves, beans, aubergines, okra, gourds of every shape, chillies, radishes, pumpkins, coriander.
In some stretches, bamboo poles now rise out of the divider like the rigging of a ship, strung up as trellises so the climbing vegetables have somewhere to go. It looks, from a distance, almost peaceful. A ribbon of farmland stitched into the spine of a national highway.
This is the same stretch of road that the Road Safety Foundation, after combing through nearly 37,000 accidents recorded between 2020 and 2024, placed on its list of 21 "extremely high risk" zones in the entire country. Sitakunda and Mirsharai both made that list.
And a separate study, backed by the Asian Development Bank, found that of 658 accidents recorded on 10 national highways over an 18-month period through mid-2026, 228 happened on this one road, the Dhaka-Chattogram-Cox's Bazar highway, more than on any other.
More than 30,000 vehicles use the highway daily, a number that keeps climbing, according to a 2020 study by the Planning Commission's monitoring wing. Trucks, buses and private cars move through here at speed, often close together, often at night. It is not a road that forgives distraction, or improvisation, or a person crouched at its centre pulling weeds.
That is what makes the cultivation so dangerous. Growing vegetables is not a passive act. Someone has to water them, weed them, check on them, harvest them, and that means someone has to be physically present on the divider of a highway where trucks are doing 60-70 kilometres an hour a few feet away.
Although there are provisions under the policy for leasing unused Roads and Highways Department land for specific purposes, there is no provision for private use of the divider of the main road. The matter has now come to our attention. Necessary action will be taken very soon.
"We know it is dangerous. Vehicles pass very close to the divider, and sometimes we have to move quickly when a lorry comes through. There is always a risk of an accident," said Rafiqul Islam, a resident of Sitakunda.
Mizanur Rahman, in Mirsharai, admitted the same contradiction sits at the heart of what he and his neighbours do. "We have been cultivating here for years, but we also know that the divider is not meant for private use. Cutting the plants and putting up bamboo structures is not right, especially on such a busy highway."
That is what should worry the authorities more than the vegetables themselves. The cultivation was found scattered across at least a dozen named locations across two upazilas, Fultala, Baro Awlia, Magpukur Par, Chhoto Kumira, Dakshin Bashbaria, Fokirhat, Dakshin Mahadevpur in Sitakunda, and Sufia Road, Wireless Mor, Thakurdighi, Bhanga Dokan, Sonapahar and the head of Chairman Road in Mirsharai. That is a pattern, sustained over years, on land that legally cannot be used this way.
The RHD's own Land Management Policy of 2015 allows surplus departmental land to be leased out for specific purposes such as road expansion or utility work. It makes no provision whatsoever for turning a highway's central divider into farming land.
Mohammad Jahed Hossain, the supervising engineer at RHD's Chattogram Road Circle, confirmed as much: "Although there are provisions under the policy for leasing unused RHD land for specific purposes, there is no provision for private use of the divider of the main road. The matter has now come to our attention. Necessary action will be taken very soon."
However, it is a familiar kind of promise from authorities in Bangladesh, one that tends to arrive only after the issue is documented and comes to light.
The environmental angle deserves as much attention as the safety one, though it is less visible from a passing car window. The RHD did not plant trees and shrubs along this divider for decoration alone. Roadside and median vegetation on busy highways functions as a windbreak, a dust filter, a modest carbon sink, and crucially, a visual barrier that reduces headlight glare between opposing lanes of traffic at night.
Strip that vegetation out and replace it with seasonal crops that get harvested down to bare earth every few months, and you lose all of that, cyclically, forever. Bare median soil erodes faster in monsoon rain, washes onto the carriageway, and creates its own hazard. None of this is being weighed by anyone, because nobody has been asked to weigh it. The RHD's monitoring, on the evidence of what has been allowed to grow, unchecked, for three years and counting, has simply not reached this far.
Then there is the second, quieter danger unfolding on the same stretch of road: the informal crossings. In places like Chauddagram, sections of the concrete divider have been broken open, not for farming but for shortcuts, so that CNG auto-rickshaws, motorcycles, battery-run three-wheelers and pick-ups can cut across the highway rather than travel to the nearest legal U-turn.
These are not accidents of geography. They are deliberate breaches in a barrier that exists specifically to keep opposing streams of high-speed traffic apart. A driver cutting across four lanes of a national highway at a gap that should not exist is one of the more reliable ways to cause a head-on collision on a road that has already proven itself lethal.
Put the two problems side by side, vegetable patches and vehicle gaps, and a single picture emerges: a highway divider that has stopped being a divider. It has become a farm plot or a shortcut, and in both cases the line between the road's two halves, the line meant to keep traffic apart and people safe, has quietly dissolved.
Fixing the issue will take more than a warning to Ashraf Ali or Rafiqul Islam, who are only doing what an unmonitored strip of land invites them to do. It will require the RHD to treat its own policy as more than just paper, patrol what it owns, replant what has been cut and close off what has been opened, before the next accident statistic comes from a spot where someone was only trying to grow dinner.
