Gross negligence and lax observance of safety norms led to yet another deadly blaze at a six-storey Shezen Juice factory building in Narayanganj on Thursday evening, claiming 52 lives. The authorities however said that the death figure could rise as firefighters continued to search through the wreckage. At least 200 people were working when the fire broke out.
Experts say the absence of proper fire safety measures and the non-observance of fire safety instructions are the main reasons behind the accident. According to them, Bangladesh, the second-largest garment exporter after China, has a long history of industrial disasters, including factory fires, with workers trapped behind locked exits. Although public outcry followed each trauma and tragedy, working conditions in factories have remained largely unchanged. We see that the factory owners have learnt nothing. They run their factories at will. The law is there on paper, but not implemented.
The country witnessed many devastating factory fires over the years, including the Tazreen Fashions in Ashulia in 2012, where over a hundred people died. After that incident, it was hoped that concerned people would be more conscious and that the government would put pressure on factory owners to follow the safety rules and regulations. But nothing has changed, the latest fire incident shows. People are again seeing wailing family members of missing workers waiting to know the fate of their beloved ones. The workers, their family members say, risked their lives to join work amid the pandemic, and many of them ended up as corpses.
Some staffers, narrating the incident, said when the fire broke out on the ground floor of the building, the security guards locked up the main gate. So the workers rushed to the upper floors to escape the fire. As the building had no fire fighting system, the fire spread rapidly. Some of the workers jumped from the rooftop to escape the fire and received fatal injuries, while others were burnt to death. Luckily, a few managed to escape death.
There is a labour ministry and other agencies for looking after safety conditions and to ensure labour welfare. In the government, hardly anybody does his duty. Most of the time is spent in sycophancy. There will be enquiry and special committees to find out how it all happened. But that will not prove that the government did not do their duty. To them burning to death of such a large number of workers meant nothing.
We have an unworkable government, so nothing is expected to work. That is the harsh truth.
