The polytechnic has a 260-bed facility, Shaheed Principal Sultan Uddin Hostel, for students. The authorities closed the hostel in 2008 due to drugs, student politics and dominance of outsiders. After a dozen years, the hostel was reopened in December last year. Currently more than a hundred students live there, but already outsiders have started to dominate.
Hostel students say, outsiders come here regularly as it is a safe haven for their drug habits. If anyone disrupts this, students are picked up, locked up and tortured. They threaten students with guns and knives, snatch mobile phones, money and expensive items. They come to the hostel, beat up the students and snatch their laptops and money. They threaten students with guns if they refuse to hand over their property.
Hostel sources say that in retaliation to the ban on entry of outsiders into the hostel, on March 3 miscreants came looking for senior students of the hostel with sticks and weapons. Not finding him, they picked up a student, Al Ameen, and took him to the nearby High Court intersection. When other students went to save him, the miscreants beat them up too. The officials of the institution have formed a five-member committee to investigate the matter.
Shakeel Ahmed, a student who recently passed out from the Power Technology department, has lodged a written complaint at the Jashore Kotwali police station against students being assaulted. Shakeel Ahmed is the general secretary of Bangladesh Technical Students Council. Around 10 to 12 people from Shekhati Adarshpara village of Jashore town upazila, including Hridoy, Sumon, Sajid and Jibon, often indulged in robbery and extortion, he said. Every year, countless students left their studies out of fear and went home.
During a visit to Jashore Government Polytechnic Institute hostel on March 6, it was observed that the annual sports competition was being organized in front of the hostel. Some members of the police force were standing on guard. At the same time, a procession came out from the dormitory, in which slogans were raised to end crime and terrorism.
