NISHAT TASNEEM

On 22 January, a 40-year-old man was standing beside a tea stall in Gulshan when a steel rod reportedly fell from an under-construction building and killed him. There was no warning, no protective net, no barrier separating the work above from the public space below. Just negligence and another life quietly added to a growing list of preventable deaths. The incident made headlines because Gulshan is not a remote worksite or an industrial zone; it is one of the most heavily policed, high-rent neighbourhoods in the country. Yet the risk that killed him is common across Dhaka and other fast-growing cities: falling construction debris hitting pedestrians on public roads.

This is not a new story. Months earlier, a 22-year-old garment worker died after a brick fell from a building under construction as she was heading to work in Jatrabari. Over the years, similar reports appear after every major construction boom: rods, bricks, concrete chunks, glass, tools, and loose materials tumbling down onto footpaths that are already narrow and crowded.

These deaths are often described as ‘accidents.’ But when the same type of incident keeps repeating, it is no longer an accident. It is a pattern. The bottleneck is that Bangladesh does not lack safety protocols for construction sites; it lacks compliance and monitoring.

SEE PAGE J2