100 Days of Rana Plaza Tragedy

First Independent Monitoring Report

100 Days of Rana Plaza Tragedy – A Report on Commitments and Delivery

The Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) has prepared the first Independent Monitoring Report on the Rana Plaza Tragedy, on behalf of the partnership which has been set up to monitor the delivery status of follow-up activities relating to the tragedy that happened on 24 April 2013. This worst man-made disaster in Bangladesh’s history, that claimed the lives of 1,132 people1 (Figure 1), injured and maimed many others, has touched the heart and soul of people beyond borders. As things stand, none of the workers would have died if the factory had remained closed after the identification of a major fault in the building the day before the incident. The Rana Plaza has become a ‘symbol’ of poor compliance concerning workplace safety and security in Bangladesh’s industrial sector, and an ‘icon’ of poor attention to the working condition of a major consuming item in the global value chain. It also implies that the Rana Plaza incident is a reflection of sheer negligence of all stakeholders involved in the value chain of the readymade garments (RMG) sector across the world.