On 24 April, 2013 an eight-story building collapsed in Savar, near the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka, killing more than 1,134 people and 2,420 evacuated alive, yet traumatized for life. Many of them now live with permanent disabilities.

Rana Plaza, which housed five garment factories, had been designed with only six stories and intended for shops and offices only. Two further stories were later added, and thus the inevitable collapse was later put on the weight and vibration of the RMG heavy machineries. Only the previous day, Rana Plaza was temporarily shut down when cracks had begun to appear in its walls and pillars, but the factory workers were later called back to work, allegedly coerced into doing so. The Rana Plaza collapse is the second largest global manmade disaster after the Bhopal tragedy.

Workers in Rana Plaza made clothes for popular Western brands, the disaster highlighted the hazardous conditions workers face in Bangladesh’s €16 billion garment industry, where many are paid as little as €30 a month. Only a few of the brands using the factories attended a meeting of the world’s largest retailers in Geneva, in the aftermath of the Rana Plaza collapse, and four made contributions to a compensation fund for victims and their families.

I had reached Rana Plaza an hour just after the building had collapsed. After reaching there I saw thousands of people gathered around the collapsed building. I saw injured people being rescued, fire brigade workers running, people crying and some running with oxygen cylinders. The massacre was unprecedented in many ways. The rescue work continued for 19 days. I went in there almost every day. I had photographed dead bodies, persons being pulled alive from the rubble, rescuers screaming for help, victim’s relatives weeping, I had taken photographs inside hospitals, morgues and grave yard. I had also photographed the “Missing” posters pasted by the victim’s relatives in the walls of nearby localities especially in hospital and temporary morgue. Scenes at the sight were nothing you would come across anywhere.
The smell of rotting corpse mixed with cries of relatives and constant shouting of rescuers made it seem almost out of a war book. After the initial shock had passed, one heart bleeding story after the other rose from the ashes, almost all of untimely deaths and loss.