Kazi Kamaruddin Government Institution, known to almost everyone in Munshiganj as K. K. Government Institution, is a secondary school for boys in Kortgaon, Munshiganj Sadar. It was founded in 1942 and is counted among the town's long-established schools.

The founder

The school was founded by Abdul Hakim Bikrampuri, one of the best known public figures of twentieth-century Munshiganj. He named it after his late uncle, Kazi Kamaruddin.

Abdul Hakim Bikrampuri was born on 5 March 1893 in Kortgaon, the same neighbourhood where the school stands. He studied at Munshiganj High School, passed the entrance examination in 1913 and went on to Dhaka College, but ill health cut his studies short. He began his working life as a teacher at Munshiganj High School.

He was also a writer. His essays, stories and poems appeared in leading Bengali literary periodicals of his day, and he edited a literary paper of his own. He later entered politics, sitting in the Bengal legislature and the provincial assembly, and served as a member of the National Assembly of Pakistan until 1965. He died in Dhaka on 4 July 1987. Founding the school in his home neighbourhood is remembered as one of his main contributions to education in Bikrampur.

The school today

K. K. Government Institution is a government secondary school for boys under the Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education, Dhaka. It teaches classes six to ten in science, humanities and business studies, and runs in two shifts, morning and day. Students wear an all-white uniform, with a red shoulder badge for the morning shift and navy blue for the day shift. The campus has several buildings, science laboratories and computer laboratories, and a library.

A neighbourhood of schools

Kortgaon is also home to Albert Victoria Jatindra Mohan Government Girls' High School, founded in 1892, so the area has long been a centre of schooling for the town's boys and girls. Both schools were started by local people and later taken over by the government, a path followed by many institutions in Munshiganj.

Like the founder himself, who studied and taught at a local school before entering public life, generations of Kortgaon boys have started out here before moving on to Dhaka and beyond.

Sources: bn.wikipedia.org, bn.wikipedia.org