WELCOME MESSAGE

It is our great pleasure to welcome you all to the International Conference on Civil Engineering for Sustainable Development (ICCESD) to be held on 23-24 March, 2012 in Khulna, Southwestern part of Bangladesh. The conference is organized by the Department of Civil Engineering (CE), Khulna University of Engineering & Technology (KUET), Bangladesh, for the first time of its kind in the host city Khulna, Bangladesh.

Khulna, the third largest city of Bangladesh and the divisional headquarter, started its journey as a municipality in 1884. The city is located in the Southwestern region of Bangladesh about 333 Km from the capital city Dhaka and stands on a natural levee of the Rupsha and Bhairab rivers. Khulna is just 2.15 meter above the mean sea level having the Sundarbans and the Bay of Bengal to the south. It is the gateway of Mongla seaport. Khulna is well connected to Dhaka by road, rail, water and air transport. It spreads over an area of 45.65 sq.km with the inhabitants of about 1.1 million. In this city, people from diverse religions live historically in a great harmony. It is flourished with culture, heritage and nature with lots of sight seeing places. Khulna is immensely blessed with Sundarbans, the largest mangrove forest of the world. It is famous for shrimp processing industries and jute mills. This city is very rich in cultural heritage and bears several places of historical interest.

Khulna University of Engineering and Technology (KUET) is one of the leading public universities of Bangladesh giving special emphasis in the Engineering and Technological education and research. KUET campus stands at Northwest corner of Khulna City Corporation, about 12 Km away from the city center, in the midst of an impressive natural beauty having vast greenery spreading over an area of 101 acrs land. KUET is well known for offering very high quality educational, research and development programs in the major disciplines of engineering as well as basic sciences. It has a sober objective to achieve excellence in quality education, research and progression to address the present needs of the country as well as the Southwestern region to make it as the "Center of Excellence" in education and research arena.

As the conference chair of ICCESD-2012, I would like to invite you to participate in this conference. We do look forward to welcome you at KUET in March 2012.

On behalf of Organizing Committee