Several hundred students of Dhaka Polytechnic Institute on Wednesday morning blocked a road at Sat Rasta crossing in capital’s Tejgaon area pressing their four-point demand to the government mainly stopping all activities related to the three-point demand of engineering and technology university students on reforming engineers’ recruitment and promotion in public services.
The protesting students brought out a procession from their campus and blocked the crossing at about 11:00am halting vehicular movement in the capital’s industrial area causing sufferings to commuters.
Dhaka Polytechnic Institute students staged the demonstration as a part of Karigari Chhatra Andolan, Bangladesh’s pre-announced countrywide protest programmes and demanded full implementation of six-point demands raised by the polytechnic students and introducing a ‘one-channel’ education system in engineering.
Protesting students alleged that a person from the Engineers’ Rights Movement recently threatened diploma engineers to shoot and kill.
‘We demand highest punishment for the person for such open threat,’ said Karigari Chhatra Andolan, Bangladesh general secretary Habib, adding that they would continue the demonstration till their demands were met.
A government-formed eight-member committee will hold two meetings in the afternoon — one with representatives of protesting students from engineering and technology universities and the other with those from polytechnic institutions, at the public administration ministry on Wednesday to review their demands.
Earlier, polytechnic students began their countrywide demonstrations on April 16 to press home their six-point demands.
The demands include the cancellation of the promotion of craft instructors to the post of junior instructor, cancelling the opportunity to enroll in a diploma in engineering course at any age, designing a four-year quality curriculum based on the model of the developed world and taking legal action against the organisations that are appointing diploma engineers to posts belonging to lower than the 10th grade.
The Engineers’ Rights Movement also launched protest programmes on August 26 to press their three-point demands.
They demanded that all the jobseekers must pass a recruitment examination and hold at least a BSc (honours) degree to enter into the ninth-grade public jobs in engineering, promotions through quotas are not allowed, no promotion can be granted even by creating equivalent positions under different titles, and restriction on the use of the title ‘engineer’.
