Why Rana Plaza will remain with us forever

Rana Plaza will remind us how a nation united at a crucial time to help humanity.

Inam Ahmed

IT will remain with us for ages to come and fester like some mysterious disease to remind us of our shameful lust, greed, nonchalance and brutality with which we treated our key export earners.

Corpses  hang tangled in the rubble as rescuers make way into the collapsed structure. Photo: Aninda Kabir Avik

Those of us who have covered the tragedy of Rana Plaza a year ago, will never forget the screams of the workers stuck inside that hunk of a collapsed building. The images are so raw and vivid --  the concrete slabs impaling the heart of the nation; the crumpled bodies hanging high on the ground and being ignored by the helpless rescuers who cannot reach there; the corpses piling on the ground -- one particular corpse looking grotesquely bloated because it has simply been squeezed to a two-feet meat chunk; the helplessness of the fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers all running towards the collapsed building with pictures of their loved ones in hand; the long nights filled with terrible cry for help coming from the bottom of a hell.

But Rana Plaza will remain with us for many other reasons too. It will remind us how a nation united at a crucial time to help humanity. There are snapshots that will keep on making us proud – the hospitals, Enam Hospital in particular, and the doctors scrambling to save every broken soul carted in, the thousands of volunteers – simple students, workers, rickshawpullers -- who actually defied death to reach every nook and corner of the concrete jungle even before the trained rescuers could go and dragged out the trapped ones; the pharmaceutical companies rushing medicines to the hospital free of cost; the big infrastructure companies mobilising their cranes and equipment which otherwise were not available with the fire department to pull apart the slabs; the army officers and jawans working night and day with their equipment. The scenes are so many and one cannot chart them all in one writing.

Rana Plaza will also stick to our memory because of the valiance and desperation the trapped workers showed. The men and women, their hands and legs buried under huge slabs and pillars asking rescuers to piece themselves out and they were. Those who performed the job of severing their limbs were no trained persons and yet they held their nerves.

Volunteers bring out a body from the rubble of Rana Plaza after cutting a hole on the rooftop of the collapsed building. Photo: Star

Rana Plaza will remain us with us because it was the single incident that really shook up the world’s worst sweat industry. Reforms were carried out following it though not fully to our satisfaction, inspection system was put in place, the heartless attitude of the owners were softened though not to the extent that could make us happy, and in general safety stands were improved.

Those more than 1,100 souls lost under the rubble of Rana Plaza have actually jolted the rest 16 crore people from a sleep. This is also why Rana Plaza will remain with us forever.

CONTRIBUTORS' PHOTOS

We requested our readers to send their photos on Rana Plaza tragedy and received immense response. Here is a selection of their photos. We express our gratitude for this gesture: