Abject lack of boiler safety monitoring

One would have thought that the death of 23 people in boiler explosions over the last four years in the country would be a wakeup call for authorities, but that is not the case. The deadliest of these accidents in a Dinajpur rice mill on April 19 that killed 17 people appears to have faded from collective memory. We have some 600 mills (300 are rice mills) in Rangpur, Rajshahi and Khulna regions which are in general, neither well maintained nor are they operated by skilled technicians and there is also the age factor, i.e. many of these boilers are way beyond their normal operational life and are 30 to 40 years old. And while blaming mill owners, we should also point the finger at factory inspection authorities. 

It is a mathematical impossibility for a single inspector to oversee such large numbers of boilers and we were promised that the concerned ministry would be initiating recruitment of new inspectors last year. We wonder what happened to that plan. The common explanation given by the authorities in the aftermath of any such incident is the formation of an inquiry committee to probe into any such incident that would provide pointers to mitigate such accidents in the future. Yet, as we all know no one is held to account for the loss of life. Mill owners are not taken to task and with factory inspection remaining only in name, boiler accidents continue to take place killing and injuring people. We fail to comprehend that a boiler is an essential piece of machinery — a prerequisite in a factory used to generate steam for sterilisation, drying, power generation, etc. Hence, it is high time factory inspectors are recruited, trained and inducted into service without any further delay.