After a lot of hesitation, I finally joined the government service. When I was at Banglalink, a multinational mobile company, I suddenly resigned from my job after receiving a huge salary offer in the African country of Malawi. Then I fell into the clutches of the Bangladeshi drunken owner of that company. Even if everything was fine, it didn’t go to the end. So I had to join the five government jobs by force. Immediately after passing I joined Telecom on impulse to be honest. Of course, telecom’s higher salary, car also provided a motivation. When I finally realized that Telecom will not pay the engineers for long. Besides trying to come abroad, I also prepared to give BCS. I have not been selected and joined in the previous two times. But this time I was forced to join the local government engineering department as an assistant engineer. Because getting a government job is difficult but impossible to get. And a lot of people have a lot of fascination with first class government jobs, but I didn’t have that at all. I was fortunate enough to visit all over Bangladesh due to my job in a mobile company. Then I knew how hardworking the common people of Bangladesh are. Still, I understood why the overall quality of life of the people of Bangladesh does not improve by joining the government job. While studying in the civil department of BUET, I came to know that it is one of the largest departments in the world’s largest universities. Because it is doubtful whether there are so many doctorate teachers in any university department in the world like BUET Civil. Teachers of other subjects go abroad for higher education and come back or not Civil teachers definitely come back.
Because there is a huge area of additional income for them in the country. They became the owners of heaps of money by consulting various firms. Besides, a lot of money can be made by taking classes in private universities. However, our teachers used to say that whatever man-made things you see above the ground and around the earth without plants fall within our scope of action.
I was posted as Assistant Engineer of Savar Upazila from the Head Office of Local Government Engineering Department (LGED) Agargaon. I stopped at Agargaon junction to go to Savar after receiving the instructions. The plan is to leave Savar at once by bus from here. After waiting for a long time, I did not get any bus to Savar.
After about half a day passed, I called the upazila engineer of Savar upazila on his mobile phone. I said, Sir, I have been standing for a long time but I am not getting any bus. Sir said, you will not come here today. Thousands of people died when a garment factory collapsed here called Rana Plaza. So the situation is heated. As a result, the bus service has also stopped. This is how Rana Plaza got involved in my life.
The next day I boarded the bus from Abdullahpur to Savar. That bus dropped us before the main stop at Savar. Rana Plaza can’t go forward because of the people who lost their relatives. Then I continued to walk. After a while we saw a stream of people running towards us from the opposite direction. They are running here after being chased by the police near Rana Plaza. We quickly entered a side street. After a while there, I heard people shouting.
I started running again. It felt like entering a Hollywood movie set. Running like this, I came to a lane and took shelter. Then I reached upazila office by rickshaw from there. I went there and saw the upazila engineer’s office full of people. In the meantime, I showed him my office order and joined.
After that, I went to the office running in the same way every day. And every day I hear the procession of corpses getting longer and longer. And every day big and responsible people from Dhaka come to our office and have tea and breakfast. The upazila engineer is busy all day to entertain them. And I ride in the back of the sub-engineer’s Honda to inspect work from site to site.
And I think that maybe an engineer must have inspected the work of Rana Plaza. He also did not convey the difference between the design and the actual work to the owner. Or did the owner avoid the eyes of the engineer and continue to work only with masonry. If that is the case, then what did the engineers of the organization supervising the construction of buildings in that area do? Or were they sold to money? The rescue operation continued. People’s emotions also started to calm down. But what really calms the emotions of people without relatives? Then at the very end staged the drama of rescuing a living person. How strange is our government, how funny is its law enforcement and what is unreal their drama.
In the beginning people believed but it did not take time to break the mistake of people. Then the case started. Everyone in Savar knows that the government party’s student body was involved with Sohail Rana, the son of the owner of Rana Plaza. The then Savar MP Murad Jung therefore sided with Sohail Rana from the beginning. But when the situation changed overnight, Sohail Rana, under trial, was placed in jail and Murad Jang was thrown into Astakure. So far he has not been able to get out of that mess and there is little chance that he will be able to. I do not want to say anything separately about the long history of law enforcement agencies and judiciary in Bangladesh. I used to regularly follow up on the progress of the cases on the pages of the newspaper. Then time passed. Flipping through the pages of the newspaper, I came across the recent news of the Rana Plaza collapse. Although eleven years have passed, the trial of the murder case is still not over. There is no estimate when it will happen.
Most of the accused are out on bail. Those who died at Ranna Plaza can count themselves lucky because they didn’t have to watch this prank. But I don’t know what is going on in the mind of those who are suffering from paralysis and living inhuman life. However, the working people of Bangladesh have always been non-ideological. They strongly believe that there is someone who is watching everything. He will rightly judge all injustices. But they do not know that that all-powerful being is also the counterpart of great people.
I have said in my various writings that the economy of Bangladesh has been put on a solid foundation by the people of three professions. Gaments workers, farmers and migrant workers. We reward expatriate workers by harassing them at the airport. Seek peace by abusing the farmer as farmer. And we never consider the people who work in Gamarnts as human beings. We don’t think for once how exactly they survive on this meager salary.
Is it possible to meet the minimum basic needs of life with this salary? And when we see them on the street, we run away as if touching them would make us impure. But the product of their labor sweat is the cheap beautiful clothes on our skin.
Bangladesh is the 10th most densely populated country in the world according to the population estimates of 2021 according to ‘Global Data’. 1277.6 people live here per square kilometer. According to ‘MacroTrends’ data, there are about 2.4 million people living in Dhaka city alone. So many people live in so few places in the world and in very few countries. This city is struggling day by day to gather the work of those people.
Our bureaucrats have always argued in the name of decentralization of power from this city. Because they must always be at the center of power or else fall short of their share in the distribution of state wealth. Bangladesh’s governance system is highly corrupt. And his victims were the common people who were never aware of their rights. As an educated man of Bangladesh, as a civil engineer, the responsibility of the Rana Plaza collapse falls on me. The sigh of the bereaved people feels a little on me. The curse of thousands of people suffering from paralysis terrifies me to some extent. How many nights have you woken up with nightmares? What a nightmare those dreams were. I just think that I am not directly affected yet this is the case then how are those who are directly affected surviving. From Savar upazila, one had to take a rickshaw to Savar bus stand through the road in front of Rana Plaza. Whenever the rickshaw started to move from the lane to the main road towards the bus stand, I no longer looked to the right because I was a very weak minded person. But as soon as the rickshaw approached Rana Plaza, an unfamiliar smell hit the nose. As long as the rickshaw passed Rana Plaza, this smell lingered in the nose.
Even after passing Rana Plaza, the smell would stick to the nose like glue. When I went home, I used to clean my nose with water first. That was the first time I knew what a dead body smelled like when it rotted. Still sometimes the smell comes to the nose. But due to the carelessness of so many people, they feel that there is no such thing as a nose in their body.
MRM/ASM
