Shamsul Palash
Ashoka Fellow since 2002   |   Bangladesh

Shamsul Palash

Shamsul Momen Palash is shifting the focus of student culture from politically charged, often antagonistic movements to broader-based environmental issues that diverse groups of students can rally…
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This description of Shamsul Palash's work was prepared when Shamsul Palash was elected to the Ashoka Fellowship in 2002.

Introduction

Shamsul Momen Palash is shifting the focus of student culture from politically charged, often antagonistic movements to broader-based environmental issues that diverse groups of students can rally around. This multidisciplinary approach identifies, engages, and trains students to lead the environmental movement in Bangladesh.

The New Idea

Shamsul believes that today's generation of university students possesses the talent and perspective to lead the country's budding environmental movement. By joining students together in this mutual concern, Shamsul is working to develop responsible, unbiased thought leaders who do not heed narrow party agendas but instead seek solutions that will benefit the whole of Bangladesh. Going beyond Bangladesh's typical university setting divided by political lines, Shamsul identifies a broad base of university students who are committed to the environment and who demonstrate the leadership, skill, and drive to create solutions to the country's growing environmental problems. He then trains this group of individuals, enabling them to garner broad support for various projects like implementing alternative strategies for watershed protection. Shamsul's idea has spread to three additional universities and continues to involve university and secondary students throughout Bangladesh.

The Problem

There is a generation of environmental citizens emerging in Bangladeshi universities. Although many study disciplines that do not address the environment as such–from engineering to social science–students are increasingly aware of the immediacy and importance of the country's environmental problems.
Because there is not yet an active and established network of citizen organizations addressing environmental issues, the university is one of the few places where people from various disciplines can share their interests and concerns about the environment. Until now the university has served primarily as a catalyst for thought and action in the political arena, rather than the social sector.
The political nature of current extracurricular activities at the university level has bred cynicism and distrust among student bodies. Currently, student life is tied tightly to the country's party politics, so much so in fact that when a new party comes to power, the control of a university's administration, including its contracted services, shifts from one party to another. Given this situation, simple issues like student housing are affected by party affiliation. Incoming students are pressured to declare party allegiance, attend rallies, and act as foot soldiers in political skirmishes within the university. These party clashes often lead to violence, student deaths, and months-long university closures.

The Strategy

Shamsul's alternative approach addresses the growing disaffection for party-affiliated student culture and takes advantage of the university's fertile ground for fostering constructive thought and cooperation in dealing with society's critical environmental issues. For the first time, many students share a common concern for the environment. Their leadership will be needed in working out the technical, economic, social, and political implications of potential changes in society. Shamsul nurtures students to take on this leadership outside of narrow political agendas.
Shamsul's approach is to engage large groups of students in understanding and protecting their environment through field trips, guided walks, and information analysis. He works with them to identify a major local environmental issue that they want to address. The students collaborate in subcommittees to explore various scientific, economic, and social dimensions of the problem. The subcommittees join to develop an action plan, which becomes the foundation for their organization's communication and intervention efforts.
At Chittagong University Shamsul has recruited 300 students to address the region's watershed situation. The water crisis in Chittagong City grows more severe each day. The breadth of the topic requires a multidisciplinary approach to address reforestation, water use patterns, river management, and other issues. Despite a recent university shutdown due to violent political conflict, Shamsul kept the leaders of his program involved and motivated. He organized housing and meetings and kept students involved in surveys, research projects, and citizen environmental movements. When the university reopened, these student volunteers led the way to bringing the organization back to full strength.
In addition to mobilizing civic participation at the university level, Shamsul has coached his Chittagong University volunteers to stage one-day "eco-camps" in local schools to foster awareness of the environment at the secondary school level. His volunteers follow up with the most interested students and help them create environmental clubs and identify local projects to implement. For example, a group of young students in Chittagong recently went door to door urging shop owners in a major shopping district to refrain from using plastic shopping bags in their stores.
Shamsul has begun the process of replicating his work at these other universities, namely Dhaka University, Mymensingh Agricultural University, and Jahagirnagar University. Before attending Chittagong University, Shamsul spent two years at Notre Dame College where he was part of a nature study club. There he developed a network of friends who agreed with his approach and were interested in working with him in the future. Using this foundation of contacts, Shamsul has identified the core founding members for these three new networks.
As a graduate of Chittagong University, Shamsul is also mobilizing new university graduates to continue activism in their own communities. He encourages them to create local citizen environmental organizations wherever they are.

The Person

Shamsul grew up in close contact with nature. As a boy he swam in the Sitalakha River, a river that doctors would prescribe for patients to bathe in for health reasons. One day while swimming, he observed large quantities of dead fish floating in the river. There was such an abundance of fish that village people started collecting them with their lungis and gamchas. Shamsul brought home a large catch, but the fish had rotted and had to be thrown out. He noticed that his father was upset at the news of the dead fish in the river. Later they read in the papers that a fertilizer factory had dumped toxic waste into the Sitalakha, thus causing this widespread environmental destruction.
From a young age Shamsul assumed leadership roles within the groups to which he belonged. As a child he raised funds to organize sports competitions. While studying in class nine, the government suddenly doubled tuition. Shamsul knew that this increase would be a particular burden on one of his classmates who came from a poor farming family in the village. His concern for this classmate inspired him to lead a peaceful protest rally against the government's tuition hike.
While studying in the forestry department at Chittagong University, Shamsul formed the Mounting Crab Hiking Club, which later evolved into the Friends of Wildlife Society. As the campus is located in a verdant rural area rich with wildlife, animals like pythons and deer are regularly smuggled from the campus. Shamsul and his society members established a system of monitoring the campus to stop this practice.
They were successful in their rescue operations, and one time they took an injured python to the medical college much to the doctors' consternation. In another incident they saved a beaten porcupine from a group of girls determined to turn its quills into hairpins. On yet another occasion, they rescued a monkey from being donated to the zoo in the name of the leader of a fundamentalist political student front. The student front members returned later to retrieve the monkey and threatened Shamsul at gunpoint. In their rage they beat the monkey to death.
Shamsul began organizing a larger scale movement in his last semester at Chittagong in 1998. He realized then that he could consolidate his activities and focus broader student interest on broader issues. He remained in Chittagong City and found employment with a nonprofit organization that works with people dependent on natural resources for their livelihood. In the beginning he traveled to campus every weekend to organize students. Gradually, he amassed his current group of over 300 volunteers. Political parties on campus have offered him bribes to turn his group over, and he continues to refuse them.

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