Five people were killed as fire ravaged an unauthorised shoe sole manufacturing factory, stashed with flammable polymer and glue in Old Dhaka’s Swarighat area on Thursday. All the victims are believed to be staffers of the factory. The bodies, charred beyond recognition, have been kept at the morgue of Sir Salimullah Medical College and would be handed to families after DNA tests. Some 50 people work at the factory in two shifts. The building also accommodates a warehouse. All machines were kept on the 6500sqft ground floor. The fire spread fast as there was a huge stock of combustible polymer and glue.
The factory, as reported, does not have authorisation to operate. Its structure is faulty. Besides, it did not have any fire safety gear. At the morgue of Sir Salimullah Medical College, family members of the five missing people kept crying and wailing throughout the day. The fire is just another incident of governmental negligence and corporate indifference to the plight and suffering of the millions of workers who work in unsafe and hazardous conditions across the country. It seems no matter how high the death toll gets from factory fires and similar incidents, the value we place on the lives of the people who continue to make Bangladesh’s economy function is seen as next to negligible.
Whether or not the owners of this particular shoe factory will ever be brought to book or whether the victims and their families will get justice is a question that has become all too easy to answer. But Bangladesh’s ambitions of middle-income status as well as to become a more significant player depends less on its ability to sustain a growing economy, and more on its ability to take care of its people on whom the economy depends. We want to say the government should take such incidents with the utmost seriousness and ensure that negligent behaviour becomes a thing of the past.
