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The collapse of a nine-storey building housing a sweater knitting factory in Savar on Monday highlights yet once again the depredations we as a society are subject to these days in Bangladesh. It is not enough to suggest that as many as 327 people have died in garment industry accidents in the last fifteen years. Neither is it a good idea merely grieving over such losses of life, though grieving is a natural thing to do. What matters is whether, if at all, the men responsible for such accidents will be brought to justice. Where it is a matter of the building that crumbled in Savar on Monday, one is tempted to ask if in the end the authorities will gather in themselves the courage and the conviction to inform themselves that wrongdoing cannot be allowed to go unpunished. To all intents and purposes, the nine-storey building was constructed in a shady manner, which thought may range from a lack of proper examination of the soil to unauthorised construction of the various floors. It has been our experience that every time a building meets with an accident, there are the numerous conjectures and discoveries thrown up about the possible causes behind the tragedy. It is a similar situation in the present circumstances.
   The loss of life, so far conservative in estimate, will likely rise as the hours go by. Whether those who may yet be alive in the debris will at all survive remains a big question. And then of course there are those already dead, the bodies waiting to be retrieved by the authorities. Given the objective reality, though, the old-fashioned nature of recovery services in the country makes the task of saving the still living and the already dead extremely difficult. That is a reason for worry. But for all our concerns about the efficiency or capability of the recovery teams to do a good job, the fact remains that nothing should be left undone where a matter of scouring all corners and points of the destroyed building is concerned. The sheer magnitude of the tragedy makes it doubly important that the families of those whose lives have been lost or who have been injured are swiftly and adequately compensated over the accident. And let the compensation not be a mere lac taka or so a family, for the lives lost or maimed are yet too precious to be measured in such off-hand manner. By far the bigger task is the launch of a brisk, meaningful inquiry into the whole sordid affair of the construction of the building and its eventual collapse. The authorities will first need to ascertain if people at the official level have been involved in allowing the owners of the building to put up the structure. With that will come the necessary job of apprehending the owners and compel them, through a proper application of the law, into coming clean on the background to the collapse. Unless such action is taken (ministerial or bureaucratic visits to the site of the disaster will not count for much unless they are followed by purposeful action), we can only expect more of the same in the coming days and months.
   The time arrived long ago for the authorities to crack down on individuals and organisations happily flouting the rules related to the construction of building structures. And if corruption is thrown into the whole bad story for good measure, one only comes by a vicious cycle of immorality which keeps taking this country for a ride. But that cannot go on. Someone in authority somewhere must be able to call a halt to such bad deeds and action.

China, Japan, history

There is something about history you cannot run away from. It is that certain propensity on the part of history to come back out of the past to haunt the present. Over the past week, it has all been a recalling of history that has been at work in Japan and China. Now comes news that the Beijing authorities have asked that Tokyo do more to calm the nerves of people. And what could that mean? For an answer, you need to go back to the root causes of the protests, which surely could not have been organised without some sort of green signal from those who matter, in Beijing. The young men and women who marched to the Japanese embassy and went looking for places selling or advertising Japanese products to attack were doing so out of the feeling that Tokyo had been misrepresenting historical facts.
   It is, as you might reasonably suppose, all about the legacy of the past. When imperial Japan went on a rampage, in the 1930s, in such places as China and Korea, it had little idea it was placing itself in a difficult future. But, to be sure, you might make the very valid point that in the past two decades and more the Japanese authorities, much like the German politicians atoning for the excesses of the Nazis, have been going around saying sorry for what Emperor Hirohito and his men did to China and Korea all those decades ago. So why have the Chinese been getting angry at the Japanese again? The answer is simple. It seems that there are yet people in Tokyo uncomfortable with the truth, which is why they are not willing to tell their school children of what their great-grandfathers did to other people so long ago. In their books, as the Chinese have noted, the Japanese have tried whitewashing the past, or the story of their contributions to the making of World War II. Hence the anger.
   And yet the two countries, like all other countries, must move on. As to the small matter of dealing with history, let it be said that pushing it aside as being of no consequence can often lead to the most devastating of consequences for people.

Death came in a flash for some as the nine-storey building of the Spectrum Sweater and Knitting Factory caved in on some 300 night-shift workers about half an hour past midnight on Monday. Some were crushed under huge concrete slabs, others under heavy knitting machines as the building turned into rubbles within a few minutes. For others, it came slow. They had lived the last few hours of their lives on a pendulum of hope and despair before death was generous enough to end their miseries. Trapped in the rubbles and critically injured, they must have hoped against hope when they heard voices outside and noises of people trying to remove the debris and break them free. As seconds turned into minutes and minutes into hours, their hope faded, as did their strength. They cried for help, again and again, until they cried no more.
   The death toll in what has been dubbed as the deadliest incident of building collapse in recent years looks set to climb. Between 100 and 150 workers may still be trapped inside the rubble. The pace of the rescue work in no way suggests that all the trapped people, dead or alive, will be pulled out of the debris in a day or two. The director-general of the Fire Service and Civil Defence has already taken refuge into the clichéd excuse that his department is equipped in terms of neither personnel nor logistics to deal with such a large-scale disaster. ‘We are all, however, trying to finish the operation quickly so that the trapped survivors do not die,’ he was prompt to add. The words may ring in some hope for those inside and their relatives outside although his admission augurs ill for a concrete jungle of a city, which, according to experts, may lose half of its structures should an earthquake, measuring six or so on the Richter scale, strike.
   The question here does not relate, however, to the city’s preparedness for the aftermath of any disaster, natural or manmade. The question concerns workers whom garment factory owners prefer to treat as numbers on the payroll. The question relates to the indifference of the authorities to so many violations to industrial safety regulations that have resulted in the death of 327 people and injury to more than 3,000 in 15 years. The reason behind the collapse of the nine-storey building at Savar has been attributed to boiler explosion or unauthorised and flawed construction on low land or a combination of both. Every reason so far suggested points to the indifference or inefficiency or both of the authorities to enforce the rules. Whenever there has been an industrial accident, the relevant authorities have put forth personnel and logistic constraints as an excuse for their monitoring and enforcement failure. One wonders why the government has not cared to equip the industrial inspection wing with adequate personnel and logistics although it knows as well everyone does that the industries do not care much about rules and regulations.
   The question leads to an inevitable answer — corruption in the government ranks. Corrupt officials at Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakkha give clearance to flawed building plans, at the Directorate of Boilers to use of outdated and dilapidated boilers, and at the office of the chief inspector of buildings to flawed residential and commercial structures in return for hefty bribes.
   However, it seems more than the question of corruption, it is a question of fellow feeling. The people in the government seem to have developed a criminal apathy to deaths of people. When a couple of hundred passengers drown in the worst ever ferry disaster, the shipping minister can afford to say it was a divine design. Or the home minister can offer solace to the bereaved family of a crime victim, saying Allah has taken back His creation. Their cosmetic fatalism betrays the indifference they have to the people. They seem to believe that a cheque for Tk 1 or 2 lakh in compensation for each victim is what they are expected to do. Their arrogant indifference appears to have seeped down to the moneyed people, the industrialists and the garment factory owners.
   The orders come in dozens — a hundred thousand dozens of denims, 200,000 dozens of sweatshirts or half a million dozens of cotton shirts or whatever garment products that are on high demand in the markets of the Americas or Europe. So came the deaths — two dozens in fire at Sun Knitting Factory in Narayanganj on January 5 and now two dozens more on Monday in the building collapse near the Savar export processing zone. Sadly, the factory owners have started viewing the deaths in figures. It is not the victims of the tragedy; it is the number of cheques they have to part with in compensation. Unfortunately, the politicians appear to have accepted the factory owners’ interpretation of the deaths. One of the first demands that came from the politicians immediately after the tragedy was that the family of each victim should be paid Tk 5 lakh in compensation. One wonders what the parameters that define the life of a worker in terms of money — his or her monthly salary and allowances over a period of ten years or so? Or, is it based on the price of the number of shirts or trousers he or she would have stitched in his or her lifetime?
   The writer is news editor, New Age