DEMO FOR MPO Teachers to begin hunger strike today

Khulna University graduate Abhishek Mondal never bent down to poverty on his way to achieving ‘first class’ at all levels in his academic career.
After completing his master’s in sociology, he joined Shimu Reza MP College in Satkhira as a lecturer in 2012 with maintaining all official procedure, including a recruitment examination where he again became first.
Thirty-two-year-old Abhishek now feels that all of his educational achievements have turned meaningless.
He is now on his fifth consecutive day of a demonstration on the street in the front of the National Press Club in Dhaka, where hundreds of teachers of school and colleges from all over the country are on demand of Monthly Pay Order for salaries and other benefits.
They, however, got no response from the government as yet.
‘We have also stomach like the MPs and ministers and we have also right to employment,’ Abhishek said showing his skinny belly, ‘and our wife, children and parents also have so.’
‘Though I never bent down to anything for achieving all first class, I am now shattered. I have no society, no friend and no relative because I cannot afford maintaining that life,’ Abhishek told New Age.

Like Abhishek, there are Birendranath Roy, Nurunnahar, Masudur Rahman, Sabina Yasmin, and Rois Uddin — who all are non-MPOs but torn between every day’s struggle to run their families and livelihood, in front of the National Press Club.
Ms Nurunnahar said she joined Rainagar Adarsha High School in 2003.
‘Fourteen years have been passed and I still teaching without any pay ... Does a minister work without pay?’ she said.
‘Is it our offence to join in any school or college? Why they (government) approve the institutions if they know that they could not give us salaries?’ she said.
Birendranath said he had been teaching at BD High School in Thakurgaon since 1999 and now he felt that he was a fallen hero.
‘I cannot give anything special to my children in any occasion,’ he lamented.
The teachers said there has been a tradition of permitting to set up a school or college and approving admission of children and recruiting teachers without any pay.
‘We have joined without any pay assurance because there are examples of giving MPO after passing few times,’ said Sabina Yasmin, principal of Shimabari Mahila College in Bogra.
‘The education ministry had approved our appointment, and it should not be that teachers would have to work throughout their lives without pay,’ she said.
Golam Mahmudunnabi, who is leading the non-MPO teachers and employees under the banner of Non-MPO Educational Institutions’ Teachers and Employees Federation, told New Age that they had decided to go for fast unto death from Sunday to realise their demand of Monthly Pay Order for salaries and other benefits.
There are about 80,000 teachers and employees of over 5,000 non-government educational institutions outside the purview of MPO, he said.
Several hundred teachers attended the sit-in, which started from Friday, in front of the National Press Club, but none from concerned authorities assured them to accept their demands, Mahmudunabi said.
Education minister Nurul Islam Nahid urged the teachers and employees to end their agitation.
‘We are fighting for you (non-MPO teachers and employees) to ensure Monthly Pay Order facilities. We have no negligence. Please leave road and return home,’ the minister said while replying to a query of reporters at his ministry office on Saturday.
‘We have already informed the finance ministry in this regard. Once the finance ministry allocates the money, we will sanction it,’ he said.
Mahmudunnabi rejected the education minister’s call to end their sit-in.

News Courtesy: www.newagebd.net