A Journey to a School That Is Not Where It Used to Be

Ten-year-old Dipu Babu walks nearly half an hour every morning across a remote char area in Sariakandi of Bogura district. Then, he boards a small boat to cross the mighty Jamuna and walks another 20 minutes along the riverbank to reach his school. The boats remain anchored at the shore on rainy days. On those days, the minor boy cannot attend his school. His school, Chakratinath Government Primary School, founded in 1919, no longer sits on its own land. In May this year, the cruel Jamuna swallowed its campus for the sixth time. Classes are now conducted in a tin-shed embankment. It is a story about the struggle of one schoolboy and one displaced school. But indeed, it points to the same hardship of countless children belonging to the families living along the banks of the country's major rivers, where schools are turning into temporary structures instead of permanent ones, and education itself has become hostage to natural disasters. 
Bangladesh has won international recognition for expanding primary education. The rate of enrolment has increased sharply, gender gaps have narrowed and access improved almost everywhere. But the educational facility of the children living in the char areas has remained poor. Chakratinath school once imparted education to some 482 children. Today there are only 74. Those missing students did not simply drop out. Their families lost their homes due to river erosion or something and moved. Some were displaced more than once. A few children ended up getting enrolled somewhere far away; others just stopped showing up, and no one quite tracked where they went. No teacher failed them, and no parent gave up on education; the river erased the community. At Chakratinath, cramped space forces teachers to run two separate shifts. When it rains hard, water leaks through the tin roof and soaks the exercise books, and lessons stop while students crowd into nearby houses, waiting it out.

When people tally the cost of climate change, they usually count the cost of ruined crops, submerged roads, wrecked homes or lost income. The loss of education is barely calculated, even though classrooms quietly become one of its most overlooked casualties. What kids in erosion-prone areas lose is not just a building; it is routine, stability, the ability to concentrate, and the sense that tomorrow’s lesson will pick up where today’s left off. 

Most erosion statistics count hectares of farmland lost or how many households were displaced. Those numbers matter, but they miss something less visible: the erosion of human capital. In the char areas, just getting to school can mean a long walk and more than one river crossing, and during monsoon season plenty of parents, reasonably, decide that is not a risk worth taking for a small child. So, attendance drops. Learning gaps grow. Some kids start working instead to help a displaced family get by.

Across Sariakandi and neighbouring Sonatola, other schools face the same threat; some already relocated more than once, others still running out of temporary structures and waiting on permanent fixes that may never come. Meanwhile, the erosion keeps reshaping whole communities; several villages nearby have reportedly lost thousands of residents in recent years as the Jamuna steadily ate through homes, farmland, and public infrastructure.

Education planners usually forecast classroom needs from birth rates and population growth. In riverine Bangladesh, there is another variable they need to start factoring in: where is the river going to be in five years? Ignore that question, and you end up designing schools for communities that may not exist by the time the paint dries.

Bangladesh has earned a global reputation for building climate adaptation into its development planning. Education deserves the same priority. Schools in erosion hotspots should be flagged before disaster hits so that relocation can happen on a plan instead of in a scramble. Temporary classrooms should be engineered for local conditions rather than improvised after the fact. And safe transport, school boats, bridges where they are feasible, and boarding options for the most vulnerable kids must be prioritised in the planning for these regions.

Protecting kids’ access to school deserves the same urgency as protecting an embankment. One safeguards land. The other safeguards what the country becomes.

The Jamuna has already taken Chakratinath six times. A seventh feels less like a possibility than a certainty. But the real question is not whether another school building goes under; it is whether Bangladesh can afford to lose an entire generation’s education along with the riverbanks. When rivers take land, governments rebuild embankments. When they take childhoods, there is no equivalent project to rebuild that. What is happening in Sariakandi is not really about vanishing classrooms or collapsing buildings. It is about opportunities that, unlike a school, do not get rebuilt once the water has taken them. 
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The writer is a senior journalist