Bangladeshi Sylhet & the river stone

The rivers coming off the Meghalaya hills into Sylhet in northeastern Bangladesh carry stone. The Piyain, the Dhalai and the others drop boulders and gravel out of the Indian highlands onto the Bangladeshi floodplain, and at Jaflong and Bichhanakandi that has produced some of the most photographed river landscape in the country: clear water over pale stone with the hills standing behind it.

It is being destroyed, and the honest version of this entry is a warning rather than a guide.

Stone and sand are extracted from these riverbeds on an industrial scale, largely illegally. Reporting in the Bangladeshi press names the same locations repeatedly: Bichhanakandi and Jaflong in Gowainghat, Sada Pathor, Shah Arefin Tila and Utmachhara in Companiganj, Lobhachhara in Kanaighat, Sreepur and Rangpani in Jaintiapur. Work runs through the night. Fifteen square kilometres including the Piyain at Jaflong was declared an Ecologically Critical Area in 2012 and the gazette prohibits indiscriminate extraction, and it has continued anyway, with political protection and administrative indifference documented at length.

The consequences are not abstract. Riverbanks collapse, the tourist sites the local economy depends on are being stripped, workers die in pit collapses, and sand taken from around the piers of the Jaflong and Dhalai bridges has left residents afraid the bridges will go.

So: this is on the map as a place, not as a locality. Do not buy river stone here and do not collect. If you visit Jaflong, and it is still beautiful, go with a local operator, spend money on the boat and the guide, and understand that what you are looking at is a landscape in the middle of being taken apart for aggregate.