Editorial
Building code remains unenforced
Rajuk the absentee regulator
IT is true that Rajdhani Unnayan Katripakkhya (Rajuk) suffers from many a constraint. The body is responsible for controlling an area spanning 1,528km2 of Dhaka Metropolitan Development Plan. Is it any wonder that Rajuk is failing to live up to the mammoth task of enforcing the national building code (BNBC) with a handful of inspectors? Despite the single largest loss of life in the collapse on an industrial plot in Savar, the dilly-dallying and bureaucratic red-tape in beefing up Rajuk personnel is sickening, to say the least.
Although there has been talk of increasing Rajuk's manpower for some time now, apparently it has taken two and a half years to get approvals from housing and public works ministry and the cabinet. This is hardly acceptable, since safety precautions and mandatory building codes are openly flouted in the construction of thousands of buildings in Savar and peripheral areas of Dhaka. Then of course there is the conflict in clear demarcation of whose responsibility ends where with many municipal authorities strongly contesting Rajuk's jurisdiction.
As per the Building Construction Act and BNBC, only an authorised officer along with a building construction committee of Rajuk can approve a building design within an area of the national plan. As things stand now in terms of both manpower and authority to enforce jurisdiction, there is little scope of doing anything besides indulging in blame game when a Rana-type Plaza incident occurs. Is it not time authorities woke up to realities on the ground? Or will the 1,100 plus people who died at Rana Plaza be mere statistics?
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