Assessment of fire risk in the readymade garment industry in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Readymade garments are the most important export item from Bangladesh, yet the working conditions and fire safety records in the factories are often not up to the standard. Despite a number of initiatives to curb fire accidents in the garment industry, there are still a significant number of fire occurrences in this industry. Unfortunately, there is no comprehensive statistics on the current status of fire provisions and management practices in the readymade garment factories in Bangladesh. Given the management practices (soft issues) are often as important as structural fire safety measures, yet difficult to regulate, this paper develops a fire risk index (FRI), the first of its kind in Bangladesh, for soft parameters in the garment industry. FRI for 60 random garment factories are developed through surprise inspections to understand the current status of fire risk due to inadequacies in the soft parameters. Results show that the mean FRI is 2.8 on a scale of 5.0, which indicates an alarming condition. Locked exit doors, lack of emergency announcement system and lack of fire drills are the three worst performers among the 24 investigated parameters and require immediate attention from the regulators and stakeholders. We also observed a U-shaped relationship between FRI and factory size. Factories that are members of the industry's trade lobby generally have better fire safety practices than the non-members. Given the importance of the readymade garment sector in many developing countries, poor fire safety record and lack of information on fire safety, our approach of developing an FRI for the industry can be very useful to understand the immediate concerns and thus to curb fatalities and injuries from fire accidents in this sector.