Prime Minister Tarique Rahman has said the people will unitedly give a fitting reply, as they did in 2024, to those conspiring to destroy the country’s industries. He also assured workers that a new minimum wage would be fixed within a month or two.
The prime minister made the remarks today at a roadside meeting at Katakhali intersection on the Khulna-Mongla highway at around 12:30pm. He was on his way to visit the shrine of Hazrat Khan Jahan Ali (RA) in Bagerhat.
Tarique said a people’s government had been established and had begun work on plans to change the fate of ordinary people, but conspirators wanted to derail those efforts. He urged the people and the country’s workers to stand up against such plots so that the conspirators got no opportunity. “Now is the time to build our country,” he said, adding that the government’s goal was one: “Let us work, build the country, Bangladesh first.”
He said those who had failed to improve living standards over the past 15-16 years, deprived people of their voting rights and siphoned off the country’s wealth abroad were forced to flee after the mass uprising on 5 August 2024. They were now pulling strings from across the border to create disorder and were about to destroy the country’s mills and factories, he alleged.
The prime minister described mills and factories as the wealth of the people and the workers. If they were destroyed, working people would be the first to suffer, and their children’s future would be ruined, he said.
On wages, Tarique said the elected government was working day and night to solve the country’s problems and expand industry and trade. Workers had made some demands about their pay, he said, and a wage board had already been formed to consider them. The board had started work and would fix a new minimum wage within a month or two.
He said the BNP had pledged to create jobs, reopen closed public and private mills and factories, and encourage local and foreign investors to set up new industries if it formed the government. The government would try to reopen shuttered factories, especially state-run ones, he said.
Recalling that Khulna was once one of the country’s leading industrial regions, he said many factories there had closed over time for various reasons. The government wanted to set up thousands of factories, from the south-west, including Khulna, Bagerhat, Kushtia and Chuadanga, to Panchagarh in the north, he added.
Earlier in the morning, the prime minister attended the signing of a memorandum of understanding on economic and infrastructure cooperation between Invest Bangladesh and China Railway Construction Corporation (CRCC), a Chinese state-owned company, in Mongla. He later laid the foundation stone of the Mongla Port expansion and modernisation project.
After the roadside meeting, he visited the shrine in Bagerhat. In the afternoon, he is scheduled to attend the opening ceremony of the second season of Notun Kuri Sports at Khulna District Stadium.
