Syed Shemul Parvez:
Due to frequent accidents in construction sites across the country, people are becoming increasingly worried about their movement along the project sites.
Experts including the city planners are also expressing their concern about the matter and emphasizing on the need of making the project sites secure for the people.
The recent fall of a BRT girder on a private car that killed five people in the capital’s Uttara shook the whole nation.
But the fall of a BRT girder is not the first of its kind in the country. Several tragic accidents involving the fall of girder occurred in the past, but the people responsible for these accidents were not brought to justice.
On Uttara’s incident, the Rapid Action Battalion arrested 10 people, including the crane operator and security guards appointed by Chinese firm China Gezhouba Group Company Limited, two days after the girder crashed on a private car on August 15.
Last month, a security guard was killed and several others were injured when the ‘launching girder’ of the same project collapsed in Gazipur.
On March 14 last year, four people were injured when a girder of the BRT project collapsed near Dhaka’s Shahjalal International Airport. Two of them were Chinese nationals.
Earlier, a part of the girder called the pier cap of the BRT project collapsed late at night at Abdullahpur in Uttara. But no one was injured there.
Not only the BRT project, but also the negligence of the Metrorail project resulted in pedestrian deaths. A person named AKM Mahbubur Rahman Talukder was killed when a brick fell from the under-construction Metrorail project on the Mirpur Section 11 road of the capital on May 30 this year. He used to work in a gold shop in Mirpur area.
The most serious accident occurred on November 24, 2012 when the under-construction flyover girder collapsed in Bahaddarhat area of Chattogram city killing 13 people.
On November 26 of that year, a case was filed against 25 people in Chandgaon police station, but the trial of the case has not been completed even today. The testimony of the witnesses is still pending.
Apart from this, on June 16 this year, a girder pillar of the Jadukata Bridge under construction in Tahirpur, Sunamganj, collapsed.
On June 7, a girder of an under-construction bridge collapsed in Kaliganj upazila of Gazipur and, on April 28, a worker was killed when a girder of an under-construction bridge collapsed on the Rangamati-Kaptai road.
In 2012, a footover bridge under construction collapsed at the Science Laboratory intersection in Dhaka, causing loss of life.
On repeated fall of girders in project sites when Dr Zia Rahman, Professor of Criminology, University of Dhaka, was asked, he told The New Nation that faults are lying with the state. He said that people were not following the policy and regulations of the state directives properly.
In the construction sector, the concerned department as well as the people is not maintaining the code of construction. The government can’t avoid the responsibility as it fails to ensure safety of people by enforcing accountability, Dr. Zia said.
In this regard, Joint Secretary of the Bangladesh Institute of Planners (BIP) Iqbal Habib told The New Nation that there are three more drawbacks for which security in the construction sites could not be ensured.
According to him, first, the concerned ministry gives the initial permits to the project without proper study. Second, the Planning Commission gives the approval without verifying the credentials of the concerned companies. Third, there is also negligence on the part of security guards of the relevant companies.
Corruption in projects is also responsible for repetition of these accidents, Iqbal Habib said.
Without making the concerned department accountable and punishing the guilty, security around the project sites cannot be ensured, he added.
