Students affected by the cyclone Aila formed a human chain in the city on Friday carrying textbooks tied with black ribbons to press home their demand to the government to take effective steps to help them carry on with their studies.
The Youth in Action on Climate and the Campaign for Sustainable Rural Livelihood jointly organised the event in front of the National Press Club. A number of civic group leaders also joined in.
The students displayed the textbooks as a symbol of their academic career and the black ribbons as a symbol of the disaster.
They said they were facing difficulties to carry on with their studies as their guardians were still suffering from lack of shelter and food and were unable to send them money to cover their study expenses.
Speakers at the human chain said around five lakh people were affected in Aila that hit the country’s south-western coastal region on May 25, 2009 and the people of the area were yet to return to a normal life.
They regretted that the repeated assurance given by the prime minister, a number of her cabinet colleagues, and local lawmakers to help the Aila-hit people effectively were yet to be fulfilled.
The prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, during her visit to the cyclone-affected areas on July 23, assured the people of making the area free from waterlogging but her assurance has come to nought due to the negligence of the Water Development Board, they alleged.
They lamented the fact that, while the rest of the country’s population was busy with the preparations for the upcoming Eid-ul-Azha, the Aila victims continued to struggle for shelter and food.
They also alleged that the contractors tasked with repairing the damaged sections and reconstructing washed out segments of embankments in the cyclone-hit area had misappropriated the contract money in connivance with a section of WDB officials last year without doing any work. Yet, the same people have received fresh contracts recently to carry out the same tasks, a fact that is really strange and indicates nothing but persistent corruption, they observed.
They demanded that the government should take steps to help them carry on with their studies as well as to complete the repairs and reconstruction of embankments immediately.
Nagarik Sangahati general secretary Sharifuzzaman Sharif and Aila-affected students SM Solayman, AK Azad, Saiful Islam, and Md Momin Sardar spoke on the occasion.
