Freedom fighter Abdus Salam, adviser to the BNP chairperson, has said nature cannot be suppressed and suppressing it never ends well. The "autocrat Sheikh Hasina" also wanted to keep the people suppressed, he said, but the people drove her from the country through a mass uprising.

He was speaking on 20 July at a tree-planting and sapling-distribution programme in memory of those martyred in the July mass uprising.

The programme was organised by Lalmatia Girls' High School and College and Begum Nur Jahan Memorial Girls' High School in Adabor, with support from Alpha Star Foundation.

Abdus Salam said: "This is not a political or workers' meeting. It is a public awareness event. Today the world's biggest challenge is to protect the balance of nature. Nature is angry with us. We are destroying nature to build modern cities, and because we have laid hands on nature, nature in turn is harming us in various ways. Heat has risen across the world. In some places the water table is falling, in others it is rising. The weather is changing and people are getting various diseases. Because of this, the balance of nature has been destroyed."

He said that first roads should be built and gas, water and electricity supplied, and then buildings put up; that is planning. "But there is no such planning. People are building houses before anything else."

Addressing the students, he said the plan for Mohammadpur, Adabor and Lalmatia, where they live, dates from the Pakistan era. That plan had wide roads, but many roads have since become narrow, and people have taken over footpaths, so there is not as much road as there should be. Nor is the distance between buildings what it should be for light and air. "So nature cannot be suppressed; suppressing it never ends well. The autocrat Sheikh Hasina also wanted to keep the people suppressed, but the people drove her from the country through a mass uprising," he said.

Advocate Runa Laila, president of Lalmatia Girls' School and College and member secretary of the Mohanagar Uttar Mohila Dal, said students must concentrate on their studies and come forward to serve the country. "Twenty-five years ago I was a student of this institution; now I am its president."

Kamrul Hasan, chairman of Alpha Star Foundation, said the foundation has taken various educational initiatives to motivate students, such as the Alpha Star scholarship, quiz competitions in schools and colleges, educational seminars, and tree planting and sapling distribution at educational institutions for greening. To reward students' merit, it is launching the Alpha Star scholarship programme in August, and it will also honour students of the SSC 2025 batch who obtained GPA 5.

Source: Jagonews24. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.