8-hour hartal in city today

The eight-hour general strike sponsored by the National Committee to Protect Oil, Gas, Mineral Resources, Power and Ports to press home their 7-point demand, including, scrapping coal-based Rampal power plant near the Sunderbans, begins today at 6:00am, in the capital.
The national committee would also hold protest rallies across the country today to realise their demands. 
The committee fears that if Rampal plant is implemented, the Sunderbans would be destroyed and about 35 lakh people dependent on the mangrove forest, would lose their earning sources.
They said many would become environmental refugees and that nearly five crore (50 million) people would be exposed to natural calamities. 
The convener of the committee, engineer Sheikh Muhammad Shahidullah and its member secretary, Anu Muhammad in a statement on the eve of the hartal, urged the city dwellers to lend their supports to the hartal by keeping their establishments shut and motorized vehicles off the roads.
‘The hartal is meant for protecting (our) resources – creating resources and to protect Bangladesh. This hartal is not meant for vandalising or arson but for people’s deliberate participation,’ the statement read.
The pedestrians, cycles, rickshaw-vans, ambulances, vehicles of the media houses, electricity and fire service, kitchen markets and medicine shops would remain out of hartal purview, the statement said.
The statement also said that the committee in the past seven years had organised a series of programmes including several long marches, protest rallies and processions and grand rallies to press home their 7-point demand but the government did not pay any heed. 
‘Instead of scrapping the Rampal power plant, the government is executing many anti-Sunderbans activities,’ the committee said. 
The other demands include resolving power and gas crisis across the country and scrapping all the projects harmful for the forest. 
Leaders of the committee urged the citizens to get united to save the Sunderbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest and a World Heritage site, at any cost, as they argued that power generation have various alternatives while the Sunderbans has none. 
Meanwhile, Progressive Student Alliance brought out a torch-lit procession on Dhaka University campus and its adjacent areas, in the evening, urging people to make the hartal a success.
Hundreds of leaders and activists of the alliance brought out the procession from Teachers-Students Center of DU in the evening which paraded through Shahbagh, Kataban, Elephant Road, New Market vicinities, ending at the Raju Sculpture of the university.
Chhatra Union president, Lucky Akter, general secretary, GM Zilali Shuvo, Chhatra Federation president, Saikat Mallik, general secretary, Ashraful Alam Sohel, Socialist Students Front’s faction president, Imran Habib Rumon among others, took part in the procession.
In separate statements on Wednesday Bangladesh United Communist League and Jatiya Ganatantrik League extended their supports to the general strike. 

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