SUFFERINGS have intensified and despair has deepened for the people who became wounded in and for the families who lost their members to the July-August uprising, with the July Shaheed Smrity Foundation — set up to provide early health care, financial assistance and long-term, sustainable support for the martyrs and the victims of the uprising — going slow apparently because of procedural delay, if not inefficiency, that the government has yet to adequately attend to. It has not been able to reach the help to most of the victims. The foundation was set up on September 17, 2024, a little more than a month after the interim government was installed on August 8, with an initial amount of Tk 1 billion from the chief adviser’s relief and welfare fund. The foundation has until December 31, 2024 disbursed Tk 100,000 each to 1,601 people who became wounded and Tk 0.5 million each to 628 families of the people who died in the student protests seeking reforms in civil service job reservations, spearheaded by the Students Against Discrimination, which began on July 1, 2024 and flared into an uprising later that month to ultimately topple the 15 years of the authoritarian regime of the Awami League. The amount disbursed in all reached Tk 473.2 million out its current fund of Tk 1.09 billion.
The Health Services Division on December 21, 2024 published a draft list of 858 people who died and 11,551 people who became wounded in the protests and subsequent uprising. The figures suggest that the foundation has been able to provide only about 18 per cent of the victims until December 31, 2024. Many of the wounded, some on crutches, and members of the victim families, meanwhile, keep visiting the foundation office at Shahbagh in Dhaka, seeking financial assistance mainly to repay the loans that they took to pay for their treatment, to bear the expenses of medical follow-up or even to buy their daily meals. Whilst some say that they have not yet received any help although they submitted the documents needed for the help a month ago, some say that they laboured to visit the office at intervals and only after a month or so, they are told that there were problems with the documents that needed to be sorted out. Some of the wounded having already lost their job because of the injuries and some in severe hardship having lost the only breadwinner of the family have even alleged misbehaviour of the people at the foundation. Most of them have complained that they could not call to the foundation’s hotline for information and they faced rude behaviour from some foundation staff when they had visited the office. Sarjis Alam, a coordinator of the Students Against Discrimination who is the foundation’s general secretary, seeks to say that the delay is consequent on the verification of information with the data centre and the papers submitted. He also complains of a shortage of human resources, 35 in all, six of whom run the call centre.
Issues of help for the uprising victims, wounded or dead, should have already been adequately shored up in view of their sacrifice in the uprising that brought about the political changeover. They should not suffer any longer.