The irony is cruel. A factory that till Friday produced food in Narayanganj district on the outskirts of Dhaka was devastated by a fire, killing no fewer than 52 people trapped by the flames. This has compounded the crisis that confronts the country on account of the deadly pandemic and the dearth of vaccines. Many workers, several believed to be teenagers, leapt for their lives from the upper floors, recalling a not dissimilar tragedy in Kolkata’s Stephen Court some years ago.
The blaze was noticed at the factory in Rupganj, an industrial town 25 km east of Dhaka, on Thursday afternoon and was still burning nearly 24 hours later. Albeit in a very different way it is reminiscent of the collapse of Rana Plaza a few years ago. Reaffirmed in the process must be the fact that Bangladesh has become direly vulnerable to man-made disasters. This is the strand that binds the Hashem Food and Beverage factory fire to Rana Plaza, where allegedly expectant and overworked mothers perished in the catastrophe.
Arguably, there will be many more casualties than reported till Friday afternoon. Visuals suggest that the building has been gutted and the eventual death-count and the number of injured may seem too horrendous at the time of calibration. About 30 people were injured and hundreds of distraught relatives and other workers waited anxiously as emergency services brought out bodies from the burning building. Police initially gave a toll of three dead but the toll rose dramatically as firefighters reached the upper floors and started bringing out dozens of bodies of trapped workers.
While the cause of the fire must await a thorough investigation, Dinu Moni Sharma, head of Dhaka’s fire department, said the disaster occurred because highly flammable chemicals and plastics had been stockpiled inside. The storage procedure thus ran counter to the certitudes of safety. To that must be added the fact that on the third floor, gates on both stairwells were closed.
As it turned out, every rule in the book on fire precaution had ignorantly been flouted. There were said to be 48 people trapped inside and Bangladesh shudders at the thought of whatever may have happened to them. Many of those injured leapt for their lives from the upper floors. It is cause for alarm that Mohammad Saiful, a factory worker who escaped the fire, said there were dozens of people inside when the blaze began.
Fires are common in Bangladesh due to the lax enforcement of safety rules. In February 2019, 70 people perished when an inferno ripped through several apartment blocks in Dhaka. Bangladesh’s economic growth in recent years has seemingly not been matched by concern for its poor. They continue to be victims, just like their counterparts in India.