Extra holiday!

The Alauddin Ahmed Degree College and United High School in Banshgram village of Kushtia's Kumarkhali upazila could be said to be ideal educational institutions, for students who like to put their feet up. While across the rest of the country Thursday is a normal working day, here it's an extra holiday. Every Thursday, due to the disruption of the adjacent morning-to-evening Banshgram bazar, which regularly spills over onto the grounds of these two institutions, classes are not often held.

Both institutions were established in the 1990s. The market is one of the oldest in Kushtia, having been active for around a century. According to locals, the problem for the school and college occurs each Thursday when the market by tradition expands to sell wholesale commodities in addition to daily essentials.

On a Thursday the loudspeakers, the commotion of crowds and the shouting of hawkers, in addition to the physical occupation of school and college grounds to sell wholesale jute, onion, paddy and other crops, is incompatible with a congenial learning environment.

The school has around 700 students while another 400 study at the college; but on Thursdays, along with many of the teachers, most simply don't turn up. Everybody knows classes will likely be cancelled.

“It makes no difference if we go to school on a Thursday or not, to be frank,” says one of the college teachers. “There will be hardly any students to teach. It's a long-term reality that we have to cope with; the impact across all educational activities is dire.”

“I've seen it like this for the last four years, ever since I started to study here,” says a class ten student of the high school.

“We can hardly even enter the school due to the noisy market crowd,” says second-year intermediate student Taher Afroz.

“I have asked several times for the market not to be run like that,” says the high school's headmaster Faruk Hossain. “But they don't care. It's very difficult to run any class on a Thursday.” The college principal, Habibur Rahman, agrees.

“It's not easy to tell a farmer to go elsewhere when he finds no other place to sell his crop at the market than the school and college grounds,” says the market's lessee Azizur Rahman. “We do try to keep the market within its boundary.”

Kumarkhali's Upazila Nirbahi Officer Shahinuzzaman told The Daily Star that the market has a lease over a specific area only and that he will look into the matter.