DHAKA, 24 March 2005 — The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) government headed by Prime Minister Khaleda Zia has issued an order to reserve 30 percent of teaching jobs for women compared to the current level of about 10 percent in all private schools, colleges and madrassas.
The decision has sparked protests from religious leaders who say the rules should be relaxed for madrassas, where boys and girls are taught separately.
“Every non-government educational institution has to fill up 30 percent of their teaching staffs with female teachers,” State Minister for Education Ehsanul Haq Milon said.
“The aim is to boost the number of women (in the workforce). We want to keep teaching jobs as a privilege for women,” he said. “We want them to come out of their homes and take up jobs in increasing numbers.”
Subsidies to private educational institutions failing to meet the new requirement will be cut, Milon said.
The government annually pays some 90 percent of the salaries of teachers in non-government schools. Around 470,000 teachers are on the payroll of some 27,970 private educational institutions, officials say.
The chief inspector of the Madrassa Education Board, Abdul Wadud, said the religious schools, which cater mainly for boys, would find it difficult to comply with the new order.
Of the 7,945 madrassa in Bangladesh, only around 12 percent are girls-only institutions and the rest are reserved solely for males, he said. “We have already told the education minister to relax the rules for us,” said Jainal Abedin, the head of the country’s biggest private madrassa, Tamirul Millat.
“He had earlier given us an assurance,” Abedin said.
“Our demand is specific and we want segregation in this regard. The male teachers will be allowed to teach only in boys-only madrassa while female teachers will be for the girls-only (institutions).”
Meanwhile, the family of a former finance minister who was killed in a bomb attack said yesterday they did not believe police had properly investigated the incident.
Former Finance Minister Shah Abu Mohammad Shamsul Kibria, a leader of the opposition Awami League, and four others were killed in a bomb blast in January. Police charged 10 people on Sunday for the attack.
“We don’t accept the probe, because it was one-sided and incomplete, and it failed to identify the mastermind of the assassination,” Asma Kibria, wife of the slain minister, said.
