Editorial
Now teachers and students blockading rail traffic
A reprehensible tendency that must stop
A front page story on Monday in this newspaper reported that rail link between Dhaka and Chittagong had remained suspended for the greater part of three hours as teachers and students of Bayek Shah Alam College of Kasbah put up barricades on the railway track in Brahmanbaria because their institution was not included in the MPO list.
At first it was the garment workers disrupting highway traffic to ventilate their grievances, and then there were the other categories of workers including road transport workers and launch operators, laying siege to road and river traffic and holding the people at large hostage, on some pretext or the other, at different times. And now we have an extraordinary situation where no less than the teachers of a local college in Kasbah upazila, along with their students block railway traffic to press home their demand for government subsidy.
For the teachers to indulge in acts that hold up public movements, and that was a main communication artery of the country connecting the port city with the capital and several other parts of the country that was barricaded, is unacceptable. Such disruptive acts least behoove a segment of the society that claims to be among the better educated element amongst us. The teachers have set a very bad example for their students.
Disrupting highway traffic, it seems, has become a culture of the aggrieved. We believe that communication infrastructure like road and railway, telecom, river and sea ports, must not be allowed to be snapped even for a moment; as these are sacrosanct not to be trifled with under any circumstances. They are, as it were, country's lifeline in the first place, and the economy consequently suffers tremendously because of such disruptions. For the traveling public the disruptive acts are equally troublesome because of the distress they are thrust into. We wonder whether the protestors realise that whatever merit they have in their case is diminished by their insensible act.
We understand that the protesting teachers and students relented only after being given assurances by the local administration. So if it is the MPO today one wonders what it will be tomorrow! Will they resort to the same violent act, this time with the demand to make their college a university college or increase of teachers' pay or some thing of the like? The tendency must be nipped in the bud.
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