ACCORD, a buyers’ group which is conducting inspections at listed RMG factories, has identified 52,605 kinds of problems in these factories, said a report of the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), a civil society think-tank. More than 1250 RMG factories out of their list of 1400 have now been inspected by ACCORD, reports UNB. The report reveals most of the RMG factories fall short in terms of common safety measures, lacking fire doors in stairwells, inadequate automatic fire alarm systems, inadequate fire separations and protected exits and lack of lateral stability in structure. It says out of the 52,605 different kinds of problems, only 782 have so far been corrected, another 10,248 have been pending for verification and the remaining 80 per cent problems still persist. The fourth monitoring report, ‘Moving beyond the Shadow of the Rana Plaza Tragedy: In Search of the Closure and Restructuring Strategy’ was presented by CPD additional research director Khondaker G Moazzem at a dialogue yesterday. CPD organised the dialogue on ‘Rana Plaza Tragedy: Two Years After’ at BRAC Centre Inn in the capital. The CPD monitoring report found that about 800 RMG firms exist which are not members of any organisation such as BGMEA and BKMEA. These factories need to be internalised in the formalisation process and need to be inspected properly. CPD senior fellow Dr Debapriya Bhattacharya questioned as the 800 factories are not members of either BGMEA and BKMEA yet, who will take responsibility if an incident like Rana Plaza tragedy takes place in these factories? About the state of RMG factories, the report says a total of 32 factories have been closed after Rana Plaza collapse because of safety concerns and several thousands workers were being affected. In most cases, the workers received necessary financial benefits from factory owners and other sources. However, in a number of cases, workers have not yet received their proper dues. A major concern in this regard is to ensure their reemployment in the RMG sector, the report says.Labor and Employment secretary Mikail Shipar, assistant executive director of BILS Syed Sultan Uddin Ahammed and executive director of Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB) Dr Iftekharuzzaman, among others, spoke at the dialogue.
