DU Correspondent :
The University Teachers Network, representing university educators across the country, has proposed a comprehensive set of recommendations to the interim government.
The recommendations, which include six immediate and 13 long-term measures, were presented during an exchange meeting held at the Professor Muzaffar Ahmed Chowdhury Auditorium of Dhaka University on Saturday. The event was titled “What Do We Want from the Interim Government?”
The network’s six immediate recommendations focus on urgent issues of safety and justice including the safety and security of people’s lives and property through robust law enforcement, preventing and prosecuting attacks on places of worship and critical installations, initiating investigations and prosecutions by establishing inquiry commissions and special tribunals, with assistance from the United Nations, to address atrocities including the July massacre, providing treatment and rehabilitation for those injured in the quota movement, withdrawing recent harassment cases and releasing detainees and opening factories and ensuring security for all workers.
The network also proposed 13 long-term measures aimed at broader societal and administrative reforms which included establishing community centres focused on various societal issues, abolishing syndicates in commodity markets and restoring market management in the agricultural sector, reforming the bureaucracy to create a more people-friendly administrative system, ensuring administrative accountability and eliminating party politics from governance and overhauling the current academic curriculum and forming task forces on education policy and universal healthcare.
The network has also suggested several proposals for reorganising national institutions and banning party politics within universities.
The programme was addressed by prominent academics including Prof. Anu Muhammad of Jahangirnagar University, Prof. Dr. Mohammad Tanzimuddin Khan, and Prof. Dr. Gitiara Nasreen of Dhaka University. The event was conducted by Dr. Samina Luthfa from the Sociology Department of Dhaka University.
Prof. Anu Muhammad underscored the primary demand of the teachers: “Our main demand to the interim government is clear. The government should turn its back to the people, and only then will all demands be met. Major changes need to be made to the constitution, as the current framework risks leading to dictatorship.”