The living standard of the Rana Plaza victims and their families went down in the last two years after the tragic incident for lack of proper and adequate support, said the fourth monitoring report of Centre for Policy Dialogue published on Tuesday. In a dialogue on ‘Rana Plaza Tragedy: After Two Years’, the CPD report said among the injured workers few were employed locally in off-farm jobs and in most cases their income was below what they would get previously. Khondaker Golam Moazzem, additional research director of the CPD, presented the report in the event held At BRAC Centre Inn in the capital, saying that they conducted a telephone interview with a selected number of victims and their family members and found that despite various initiatives they were not financially at the same level compared to their condition prior of the collapse of Rana Plaza. According to the report, the respondent victims are still suffering from various physical and mental problems and many of them are constrained by financial inadequacy. The report also said two year after the incident the victims are yet to get the full compensation. Lack of progress of the directives of the High Court with regard to compensation is another hurdle to local initiatives, the report stated. Morium Begum, wife of a deceased day-labourer, said she lost her husband in the Rana Plaza collapse but she was yet to receive any compensation as her husband was not garment worker. ‘After the tragedy I received the body of my husband with Tk 20,000 for burial and till now I got nothing else,’ she said. Jesmin Akter, a survivor of Rana Plaza, said in the accident she received injury in the spine and got treatment from Centre for the Rehabilitation of the Paralysed. ‘Now I cannot move and treatment is still going on but I received only Tk 50,000 from the Trust Fund as compensation,’ she said. Syed Sultan Uddin Ahmmed, assistant executive director of Bangladesh Institute of Labour Studies, said the culture of accountability should be developed to bring the people responsible for the incident to book. Abdus Salam Murshedy, president of the Exporters Association of Bangladesh, urged the victims and their families, who were yet to get financial support, to contract the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association. Murshedy announced to take the responsibility of Jesmin Akter, a survivor, and asked her to join his company. Labour secretary Mikail Shiper said if the victims and their families thought that the assessment of their compensation amount was not right they could file complaints with the Rana Plaza Claim Administration.
