Students suffer as garbage container placed near school

Shamsunnahar Begum takes her daughter Sayma, a second grader, to the Sher-e- Bangla Nagar Shishu Shikkha Government Primary School in the capital every morning. The mother-daughter duo cannot use the main gate of the school as an open garbage container placed on the road in front of it.

They have to use a smaller gate to enter the school to keep away the terrible stench coming out of waste dumped into the container.

"The stench haunts kids even when they are in the classes," Shamsunnahar Begum told The Business Standard.

The school runs from 7.00 am to 3.00 pm with about 1,300 students from pre-primary to 8th grade. There is also the office of the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB-2) in around 100 metres of the garbage dump.

Sabbir Hossen, a student of the school, said, "We cannot play in the field due to the foul smell. Sometimes we cannot even sit inside the classroom due to the stench. It becomes very hard to breathe when we try to walk beside that part of the road."

Not only the teachers and students of the school, local people and pedestrians who commute the part of the road regularly also have the same complaints.

They said waste collected from the households of nearby residential areas are dumped open-air in front of the school.

Regular traffic on the road also gets hampered due to scattered garbage on the road once the container is overwhelmed. 

Officials of Dhaka North City Corporation say that the permanent garbage bin in the area was evicted during development works. As a result, waste is now being kept in temporary containers in front of the school.

They said they are searching for lands in the area to construct a new secondary transfer station (STS).

Teachers of the school say the garbage bin has not been removed from the area even after filing written complaints to the city corporation.

Amrapali Basak, head teacher of the school, said, "We have been requesting for the last one year to remove this heap of waste from here. We have also filed written complaints to the city corporation, but to no avail."

"The Wife of a local councillor is the president of our school. We have also requested her several times to solve the issue. But nothing happened," he added.

Faridur Rahman Khan, councillor of ward-27 of Dhaka North City Corporation, said, "We have provided the temporary garbage container after getting requests from the locals. But our selection of the place has been wrong. Now the city corporation has stopped dumping waste in the container, but the locals are dumping waste there. We collect the waste at night."

We will remove the temporary garbage container from the place very soon. We are looking for land to build a secondary transfer station in the area, he further said.

Mofizur Rahman Bhuiyan, assistant chief waste management officer of Dhaka North City Corporation, told The Business Standard, ""We too want to keep people free from any kind of waste related problem. But recently one of the STSs in the area had to be demolished for road development works. As a result, a temporary container has been placed there."

He said, "The construction of an underground STS is in progress to solve the problem."