Shawdesh Desk:

Chemical business continues unabated in Old Dhaka even after deadly fire incidents originated from such substances there.

The last such fire disaster at a chemical warehouse-cum-residential building at Chawkbazar on February 20 killed at least 70 people and left scores seriously injured.

The families of many dead in the Chawkbazar inferno said that they were living a subhuman life after losing their earning members as the government was yet to give them any compensation.

Demanding justice and compensation the victim families formed a human chain in front of the fire-ravaged Wahed Mansion at Churihatta of Chawkbazar in Old Dhaka on Friday.

Nasir Uddin, father of Wasi Uddin Mahid, the only earning family member who perished in the fire, said that after the disaster prime minister Sheikh Hasina, different ministers and Dhaka South City mayor Mohammad Sayeed Khokon promised to compensate the victim families and provide government jobs to their dependents.

Sixty-year-old Nasir, whose family has no other earning member, said that none of the victim families got any financial compensation or job even nearly seven months have passed after the incident.

Not even the government has distributed the Tk 30 crore donated by private banks to the prime minister’s Relief and Welfare Fund for the Chawkbazar fire victims, they (victims) said.

The government only provided Tk 20,000 for the burial or cremation of each dead person.

The disaster ministry can provide no assistance other than the cost of burial under the rules, additional secretary Md Akram Hossain told New Age.

Deputy inspector general of the department of inspection of factories and establishments Ahmed Belal said that after the Chawkbazar fire they made a list of 27 dead workers in order to give them financial support from the Bangladesh Labour Welfare Foundation.

BLWF director general Anisul Awal said that they expected to pay over Tk one lakh for each dead worker but could not do that in the past two months due to various complications, including difficulties in selecting the genuine successors.

‘A list of victims and their successors have been prepared but the date is not yet fixed for distribution of the money,’ he said.

He told New Age on Sunday that the families of the dead workers would get the money within a month.

Monsur Ali Dipu, a salesman at a Chawkbazar shop, lost two siblings named Mohammad Ali and Apu Rayhan and a son-in-law named Arafat to the fire told this newspaper that after the heart-rending incident his parents became almost mad.

He urged the government to rehabilitate his family and pay the due compensations ‘to help us stand on our own.’

Meanwhile, the owners of Wahed Mansion obtained bail in the case filed following the fire and started to reconstruct the building without any engineering clearance from the authorities, said residents.

Local people also said that after the deadly fire incident the city corporation ran a month-long drive to evict chemical warehouses from the densely populated residential area but many such chemical storage facilities were still situated there.

The government probe reports said that the fire originated from a chemical warehouse located at Wahed Mansion, a commercial building on Nanda Kumar Dutta Lane, Churihatta, barely 2.5 kilometres away from Nimtoli where a deadly fire from chemical explosion killed 124 people in 2010.

The Nimtoli fire prompted the government to decide to relocate the chemical depots, factories and storage facilities from the over-populated Old Dhaka.

Ashiq Uddin Sainik of Nanda Kumar Datta Lane told New Age that chemical businesses made their way back to the densely populated areas of Old Dhaka immediately after the taskforce ended the eviction drive against the illegal businesses.

He said that obviously people lived in panic in Old Dhaka as they were exposed to ‘time bombs’.

Shahed Ullah, who lost his two sons Masud Rana and Mahbubur Rahman Raju in the Chawkbazar fire, made a fresh demand for relocation of the flammable chemicals from residential areas to river side places.

Fire Service and Civil Defence director general Brig Gen Sazzad Hussain told New Age that the agency was taking legal measures against errant businessmen who stored flammable items in their shops.