Communications widely disrupted in Bangladesh as student protests spike

NEW DELHI: Telecommunications were widely disrupted in Bangladesh on Friday amid violent student protests against quotas for government jobs in which nearly two dozen people have been killed this week.

French news agency AFP reported that the death toll in Thursday's violence had risen to 32. Reuters had reported that 13 people were killed, adding to six dead earlier in the week, and could not immediately verify the higher number.

Authorities had cut some mobile services on Thursday to try to quell the unrest but the disruption spread across the country on Friday morning, Reuters witnesses in Dhaka and New Delhi said.

Telephone calls from overseas were mostly not getting connected and calls through the internet could not be completed.

Web sites of several Bangladesh-based newspapers were not updating on Friday morning and their social media handles were also not active.

Only some voice calls were working in the country and there was no mobile data or broadband on Friday morning, a Reuters photographer in Dhaka said. Even SMSes or mobile-to-mobile text messages were not going through, he added.

The nationwide agitation, the biggest since Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was re-elected earlier this year, has been fuelled by high youth unemployment. Nearly a fifth of the country's 170 million population is out of work or education.

Protesters are demanding the state stop setting aside 30% of government jobs for the families of people who fought in the 1971 war of independence from Pakistan.

Hasina's government had scrapped the quota system in 2018, but a high court reinstated it last month. The government appealed against the verdict and the Supreme Court suspended the high court order, pending hearing the government’s appeal on Aug. 7.

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