THE parliamentary standing committee on the Ministry of Primary and Mass Education on Wednesday expressed dissatisfaction over the slow progress of the ministry in reclaiming the lands of 51 primary schools grabbed earlier, the committee chairman said, as reported by a local daily. The watchdog body also recommended for not approving registered primary schools any more. The committee also discussed the state of reaching out of school children (ROSC) project and expressed dissatisfaction over it.
The watchdog body in a meeting held in October recommended the ministry to take steps, including filing cases against land grabbers, but the ministry informed the committee that they have only prepared to file cases or asked for reports from the deputy commissioners concerned in this regard. The initiative was taken following media reports over illegal occupation of lands, buildings, and classrooms of different government primary schools in the metropolitan cities Dhaka and Chittagong.
Committee chairman told newsmen after the meeting that the committee recommended that the ministry should come up with a report in the next meeting about what action has been taken against the land grabbers. ‘The ministry has taken almost no action on reclaiming the grabbed lands and so the committee members expressed dissatisfaction over the callousness of the ministry. Though we have only information about lands of 51 schools that have been grabbed, the actual number is much higher,’ said the committee chairman.
It should be painfully obvious that the people who have grabbed the school lands are politically or economically influential in the particular locality where the school land exists. It is disarmingly simple to grab school land — bribe the school custodians to look the other way or bribe the influential political leaders to ensure that the local authorities do nothing about it.
But this has its costs – the benefits which are gained by the grabbers and the people they bribe in the form of commercial rent revenue is wiped out by the loss of school land which is available for either the education or sport of children. It is simply not possible to calculate the negative social costs incurred with the reduction in school land – if children can’t play properly with their peers then they grow up to be socially dysfunctional – as has been proven in countless studies. The loss of even one such individual to society can’t be simply expressed against the gains in the form of black money revenue to the grabbers. This must stop — but again the political will to do this must exist.
