FAILING to find a seat at a hall of residence, first-year students of the Dhaka University have to live in subhuman conditions on hall room floors, in the guest rooms, mosques, canteens, television rooms, at balconies and even on the rooftops of the halls. The situation has worsened over the years as the ruling Awami League-backed student body Bangladesh Chhatra League controls the allotment of rooms at the male halls instead of the house tutors.
Nearly five thousand students get admission each year at Dhaka University with most of them coming from outside the capital. As these students have no suitable place to live in the city of Dhaka, they try their best to get a seat in a residential hall of the university.
Taking advantage of the accommodation crisis students allege that the Bangladesh Chhatra League has turned four-bed rooms into ‘mass rooms’ putting in these 30 to 40 first-year students almost in all the male dorms, depriving meritorious students of residential facility and forcing the resident students to join their political programmes in the process. The pro-AL student organisation even drives out resident students from their rooms allotted by the authorities or forces them to share their beds with BCL activists, general students further alleged.
It is very easy to resolve this problem. If BUET can ban student politics from the campus then why can’t DU? If students want to do politics they can do it outside of the campus area. The DU residential hall allotments should not be politicised to help ruling party student members gain control over general students.
What are the hall tutors doing? It is a sorry indictment of the politicisation of our campuses that they are afraid to step in and take control. In this vacuum of able leadership the student wing members of the ruling party are stepping in to control the room allotments and thereby gain power over the students.
De-politicisation of the University Administration of the premier university of the country is essential for solving this problem. The university should allocate a big part of its budget for residential hall renovation and for making new halls to solve this age old problem.
