Students staged a protest in several parts of Dhaka on Tuesday, demanding the resignation of Education Minister ANM Ehsanul Haque Milon over the government’s decision to continue the Higher Secondary Certificate (HSC) examinations despite persistent heavy rainfall and widespread waterlogging across parts of Bangladesh.
The protests centred on what students described as the difficulties of attending examination centres during severe weather, alongside complaints about alleged mistakes in the Physics First Paper examination.
Large groups of students gathered outside the BNS Centre in Uttara and at the Science Laboratory area, where they held rallies and formed human chains.
Protesters chanted slogans calling for education to remain free from political influence and urged the minister to step down.
The demonstrations led to road blockades, causing traffic disruption in the affected areas of the capital.
Students said many candidates had faced significant challenges travelling to examination centres because of flooded roads and poor weather conditions.
Some claimed that candidates in heavily affected districts had been forced to use boats to reach their examination venues after continuous rainfall left roads submerged.
Protesters argued that the authorities should have postponed the examinations until conditions became safer.
They said repeated appeals to delay the examination schedule because of flooding, waterlogging and adverse weather had not been acted upon.
Alongside concerns about the examination timetable, students also questioned the quality of the Physics First Paper examination.
They alleged that Questions 6 and 7 contained errors and said the paper failed to provide a fair assessment under the circumstances in which candidates had prepared.
The protesters stressed that their objections were not based on the difficulty of the examination itself. Instead, they said they believed the examination process had been unfair given the disruption caused by the extreme weather and the alleged mistakes in the question paper.
The demonstrators also presented an eight-point list of demands. Among them were the resignation of the education minister after accepting responsibility for what they described as failures in the examination process, a public apology to students and teachers, an end to what they called unnecessary experimentation with the public examination system, and the temporary suspension of HSC examinations until weather conditions improve.
The protests come as concerns continue to grow over the impact of heavy monsoon rainfall on students in several regions of Bangladesh, where flooding and waterlogging have disrupted daily life and affected transport networks.
The controversy has added further pressure on education authorities as thousands of candidates continue to sit this year’s HSC examinations under difficult conditions.
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