Untangling Matarbari

The mid-day heat in Matarbari was relentless, but inside the makeshift office, the real pressure was humming from the server racks and stack of land deeds. It was late 2018. The Coal Power Generation Company Bangladesh Ltd. (CPGCBL) project was moving fast, and with it came a massive logistical challenge: thousands of families, acres of shifting boundaries, and a ledger of over 52,000 stakeholders waiting for compensation.

As a young assistant engineer, i quickly realized this wasn’t just a challenge of civil engineering—it was a data crisis. The records were a labyrinth. Service firms, administrative offices, and local representatives constantly passed data back and forth. Human error was inevitable, and with millions in compensation on the line, a single oversight meant a family missing their payout, or the company paying twice for the same plot of land.

The turning point came when i closed the spreadsheets and opened an IDE. Instead of relying on manual spot-checks to catch overlapping claims, i began writing Python scripts to parse the records. I built tools that could cross-reference names, plot IDs, and payouts in seconds, automatically flagging duplicate entries before they could turn into costly administrative blunders.

Suddenly, a process that used to take days of tedious cross-checking happened at the click of a button. When discrepancies popped up—as they often did—i became the bridge, sitting down with external service firms and local stakeholders to untangle the paperwork, resolve the technical hitches, and keep the project moving forward on solid ground.