Bangladeshi students protest against public sector employment quotas

DHAKA:

Thousands of Bangladeshi university students barricaded key highways on Sunday, demanding an end to “discriminatory” quotas for coveted government jobs, including reservation for children of liberation heroes.

Students at nearly every major university participated, demanding a merit system for well-paid and massively overfunded civil service positions.

“It’s a do-or-die situation for us,” protest coordinator Nahidul Islam said AFPduring marches at Dhaka University.

“Quotas are a discriminatory system,” added the 26-year-old. “The system needs to be reformed.”

The current system retains more than half of the positions, totaling hundreds of thousands of government jobs.

This includes 30 percent earmarked for the children of those who fought to win Bangladesh’s independence in 1971, 10 percent for women and 10 percent earmarked for specific areas.

The students said only those quotas supporting ethnic minorities and disabled people — six per cent of jobs — should remain.

Critics say the system benefits children of pro-government groups that support Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

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Her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was the founding leader of Bangladesh.

Hasina, 76, won a fourth consecutive general election in January in a vote with no genuine opposition parties, widespread boycotts and a major crackdown on her political opponents.

Critics accuse Bangladesh’s courts of rubber-stamping her government’s decisions.

The system was initially abolished after weeks of student protests in 2018.

But in June, the Dhaka High Court struck it down, saying the annulment was invalid.

Hasina condemned the protests, saying the matter was settled by the court.

“Students are wasting their time,” Hasina told female activists from her party on Sunday, Bangladeshi newspapers reported.

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“After the court’s verdict, there is no justification for the anti-quota movement.”

The protests began earlier in July and have grown in size.

“We will bury the quota system,” chanted students on Sunday in Bangladesh’s second city, Chittagong, where hundreds of protesters marched.

In Dhaka, hundreds of students blocked traffic for hours, police said.

At the elite Jahangirnagar University, at least 500 students blocked the highway linking the capital to southeastern Bangladesh “for two hours,” local police chief AFM Shahed said. AFP.

Bin Yamin Molla, a protest leader, said at least 30,000 students took part in the protests, although the number could not be verified.

Bangladesh was one of the world’s poorest countries when it gained independence in 1971, but has grown by an average of more than six percent every year since 2009.

Hasina has led this breakneck economic growth, with per capita income in the country of 170 million expected to surpass India’s in 2021.

But much of that growth is driven by the mostly female factory workforce that powers the garment export industry, and economists say there is an acute jobs crisis for millions of university students.