It is reported that Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority's project to excavate the Badda canal, in order to reduce water-logging across vast areas of suburban Dhaka is being scuppered by a one-kilometre stretch of canal land-filled by the company Eastern Housing for its Aftabnagar project. There is little debate that the circular waterway project is one of the most appropriate and innovative public transport projects that could greatly reduce the existing pressure on Dhaka's roads system by diverting all north-south and east-west passenger traffic through the river and canal systems that form the metropolis's periphery. This project will not only save the city from exponentially rising traffic pressure, it will also save the residents and commuters valuable time and energy, and the country valuable fuel resources. It is also beyond any reasonable debate that for Dhaka's long-term survival, the low-lying canal systems that form its periphery and provide much-needed drainage routes during the monsoon, must be protected from land-fills, even at a high cost. It is for this reason that the Wetlands Protection Act of 2000 provides for a host of measures that secure this protection by law. The floods that the capital has increasingly been debilitated by in the past decade have less to do with severity of the monsoon, and more to do with the unplanned, and illegal real-estate projects that are land-filling the canals on the northern and western parts of the capital. In our view, the principal culpability over the allotment of wetland areas to a real estate company lies with the government, because it has knowingly violated the laws of the land. According to Eastern Housing, the land in the Badda Canal was allotted to them by the Dhaka deputy commissioner's office in exchange for land ceded by them to the government elsewhere. The incumbent regime should now seek out those officials in the DC office who have committed this illegality, which may now stand in the way of a large public interest development project that would benefit millions of people. Unless the government takes stern steps in holding its own cadre accountable for such irregularities, there will always be private entrepreneurs who will take advantage of corruption, non-accountability, and lack of coordination within the government.