For the last fifteen years, buildings have been catching fire for the same reasons, with the same promises following each tragedy. If resilience truly starts at home, then home, in Bangladesh's cities, is precisely where it keeps failing.
Every October 13, the world observes the International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction. This year's theme, "Resilience starts at home," is meant to be read gently, as a call to prepare our households for disasters. In urban Bangladesh, it reads more like a warning.
A city that keeps reliving the same night
The roll call is long and familiar. From the Nimtoli chemical warehouse fire in 2010, which killed at least 124 people, to the Tazreen factory fire in 2012, the Bailey Road restaurant fire in 2024 and the Korail fire in 2025, Bangladesh's cities have repeatedly witnessed preventable loss of life and homes.
Across such incidents, well over 400 people have died. Almost none of the resulting court cases have reached a verdict.
The details differ, but the pattern does not: the conditions that allow a fire to become a disaster are often present long before the first flame.
The disaster is often built before the fire starts
Faulty electrical wiring and overloaded circuits are among the most common triggers. Gas cylinders used in homes, restaurants and vehicles can turn routine activities into deadly emergencies. Chemical warehouses and flammable stock are routinely stored in buildings never designed to contain them, turning a fire into an inferno within minutes.
Factories and high-rise commercial buildings with inadequate or locked emergency exits become death traps when smoke fills a corridor. Restaurants have proliferated on upper floors of buildings not designed for such use, sometimes obstructing escape routes. In informal settlements, tightly packed housing, exposed wiring and narrow lanes can allow a single spark to spread across an entire neighbourhood.
The problem, then, is not simply fire. Risk is built into the way buildings are designed, approved, occupied and maintained.
Rules on paper, risk in practice
Bangladesh is not short of regulation. The Bangladesh National Building Code, mandatory since 2006 and updated in 2020, sets out fire-resistant design, mandatory exits, hydrants, sprinklers and detection systems, and any building must secure fire safety clearance from the Fire Service and Civil Defence before RAJUK approves its design.
The gap is not in the law; it is in its application. A parliamentary disclosure put the share of Dhaka buildings violating the code at around 66 per cent. A RAJUK survey of over 200,000 structures found roughly two-thirds defective, risky or uninhabitable, while separate data found nine in ten surveyed buildings deviated from their approved designs. Too often, a design approved on paper is altered or repurposed in practice, without effective follow-up.
From certificates to inspections that bite
Closing this gap does not require new laws so much as the will to enforce existing ones. Building and fire approvals need to be digitised and linked, so a change of use or an expired licence is visible to regulators automatically rather than discovered after a tragedy.
Fire clearance should not be a one-time certificate issued at construction; it needs to be a recurring inspection, with real penalties, including sealing premises, for buildings that let it lapse. The Bangladesh Building Regulatory Authority envisaged under the BNBC 2020 should be operationalised with a clear mandate for consistent enforcement. RAJUK, city corporations and the Fire Service need enough trained inspectors to visit the hundreds of thousands of buildings under their jurisdiction. And court cases following major fires need to reach a verdict.
Six policy fixes we cannot keep postponing
Planners, engineers, lawyers and fire-safety experts have converged on broadly the same list of reforms after each tragedy; what has been missing is follow-through.
First, establish a dedicated Building Regulatory Authority to implement the Building Code consistently, instead of leaving it split across RAJUK, city corporations and the Fire Service with no single body accountable.
Second, harmonize the Fire Prevention and Extinction Act 2003 with the Building Code, so the two frameworks set the same standard.
Third, publish a tiered public registry of high- and moderate-risk buildings, so tenants and regulators know which structures need urgent attention before they burn.
Fourth, require every building to display an annually renewable occupancy and fire safety certificate at its entrance.
Fifth, make hospital, industrial and commercial fire protocols mandatory: functioning lifts, unlocked and clearly marked exits, refuge floors and regular evacuation drills.
Sixth, back all of this with real investment in the Fire Service's staffing and equipment, alongside a coordinated national occupational safety framework of the kind the International Labour Organization has urged Bangladesh to adopt since the Bailey Road incident.
Resilience starts at home, or it does not start at all
Every fire on this list was, in hindsight, foreseeable: a blocked exit, a warehouse in the wrong place, a licence never renewed. Resilience starting at home means exactly that literal thing here -- a safe electrical line, a clear staircase, a landlord who does not store chemicals beneath a family's bedroom.
Government agencies can write codes and NGOs can rebuild what fire destroys, but neither can retrofit safety into a building after the fact. Bangladesh's cities do not lack rules; they lack the follow-through to make those rules real, in every home, before the next spark catches.
Khondoker Golam Tawhid is the Programme Head of the Disaster Risk Management Programme at BRAC.