Editorial
Is it compensation or insult?
The very culture has not grown
In the event of an industrial worker's death or injury in the line of duty, neither any member of the bereaved family nor the wounded victim himself or herself is recompensed automatically or with any degree of certainty. Even where there is some provision for compensation, the aggrieved family has to go from pillar to post to receive the paltry sum not without a corruption premium paid, though. In fact, recompense is more of an exception than the rule. The tale of the family of deceased sixteen year old worker Md Alam is a case in point. The lad died from a terrible accident. While working at the SR Steel Complex in Shyampur Industrial Area molten iron with temperature of 1200 to 1500 centigrade splashed on his head and rolled down to his back. An industrial court invoking an outdated compensation law -- of 1923 -- ordered the factory authority to pay his family Tk 21,000 only. The same law provides for Tk 30,000 in injury compensation, but bafflingly Tk 21,000 in death compensation. Is death a smaller misfortune than injury? Actually, the whole concept is wrong. The allowable figure is a cruel apology for compensation and the assessment of losses bears little relation to the magnitude of disaster suffered in the absence or the maiming of the only bread earner in the family. That is bad enough. But imagine the plight of the families of those who died or the ordeal of those crippled in fire accidents in garment industries and through launch or highway accidents who are seldom paid any compensation. And, we have had so many such disasters in recent years. We may be a poor country but the owners of garment factories, launches and buses, and in the case of the railways, the government are certainly not. On the contrary, they make profits, many of them sky-high. We have a strong feeling it is time the government put a comprehensive compensation policy in place through consultation with the key players in public and private sectors to give a more civilised account of ourselves.
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