Safety rules must be followed at ship-breaking yards

Life is becoming increasingly unsafe in Bangladesh. Nobody knows where and when a disaster will strike him next. But if the place is a factory, or a more hazardous ship-breaking yard, this risk multiplies. The relevant authorities care little about the workers’ safety precautions at these places.
Ship-breaking industry in the country contributes no little percentage to our economy. But here the workers work in the most unsafe environment. It is a pity that poor people’s lives are taken as a cheap thing. Even on Thursday a worker at a Chattogram’s Sitakunda upazila yard died in an accident. The victim sustained burn injuries from an explosion while cutting a pipe in a ship.
Quite often we hear news of the death of labourers from the ship-breaking yards. According to a report yesterday, in the last 18 years a total of 251 workers were killed in accidents at ship-breaking yards. A simple but true answer to the question why do these accidents occur is negligence shown by the owners of yards to workers safety.
There are certain internationally recognised rules to follow while breaking a ship. Owners must mandatorily remove all toxic elements from a ship before bringing it ashore for breaking which is hardly followed by owners in Bangladesh. The owners are also rule-bound to train workers for the work of breaking ships. This also is not followed. Moreover, owners do not provide adequate safety gears for the work.
Bangladesh’s labour law also stipulates that a worker involved in risky work should get rest for half an hour after every two hours of work. This rule is also not followed at ship-breaking yards. This lax following of rules at the ship-breaking yards urgently calls for monitoring of yards while workers work at the place.
In a poor country like ours where income generating works are not available, people are compelled to go for ship-breaking work despite knowing that risk to life is involved in this work. But owners’ greed for money cannot make the lives of workers at the yards cheap.