More than 120 people are reported killed in a fire accident at an eight-storey garment factory, located to the northwest of the Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka. According to reports, the fire started from the warehouse on the ground floor and quickly spread to the rest of the garment unit. It took nearly 17 hours for the firefighters to bring the blaze under control.
While the exact cause of the fire is yet to be ascertained, officials attribute the accident to a bad electrical circuit. The razed garment unit belonged to Tazreen Fashions, which employed about 1,500 workers and supplied apparels to several global retailers including Walmart.
Two years ago, a transformer blast had killed at least 117 people at a clothing factory in Dhaka and it is estimated that over 500 people have lost their lives in fires at various apparel units across Bangladesh in the last 5-6 years.
The South Asian nation is currently the second-largest apparel exporter in the world. The readymade garment industry in Bangladesh employs around 3 million workers, most of them women.
Earlier, fibre2fashion had taken comments from global apparel retailers like Levi Strauss & Co., Tchibo, adidas Group, Arcadia Group, Next, Timberland, VF Corp and H&M on various measures adopted by them towards providing a congenial and safe environment to garment workers, especially in low-cost garment manufacturing hubs like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Cambodia, India, etc.
