The government has decided to appoint the Japanese firm Oriental Consultants Global as consultants of the Public Works Ministry’s Urban Building Safety Project.
Oriental Consultants Global Company Limited secured first position among the three firms that bid for the job, a ministry official told the Dhaka Tribune on Monday.
The other firms in the bid were Indian firm EGIS and Irish firm Ove Arup and Partners Ltd.
Public Works Ministry’s proposal on this matter will be placed in the next cabinet committee on public purchase meeting.
The official said the Urban Building Safety Project already began last year but a consultant was yet to be appointed as the decisions were delayed after the Holey Artisan cafe terror attack.
“It is a good news that Oriental Consultants Global is back in business and has participated in the this tender,” the official said.
The firm will receive Tk106 crore in consulting fees.
According to the proposal, the tender submission date was extended by 12 days in 2016 after the Gulshan cafe terror attack. Three Oriental employees, Hiroshi Tanaka, Nobuhiro Kurosaki and Hideki Hashimoto, were killed in that terror attack.
Six of the seven Japanese killed in the Gulshan cafe terror strike were surveyors for Dhaka’s Metrorail project. They had been working for Route-1 and Route-5 of the project of Metrorail project.
The consultancy has two components, Private Building Safety and Public Building Safety.
As per the project proposal, the project aims to strengthen the building safety in Urban areas by financing loans for building safety for private buildings through Participating Financial Institutions, and by improving the building safety for public buildings, and contributing to improvement of the social vulnerability in urban areas.
Dhaka and Chittagong are the major cities of Bangladesh, accounting for approximately 50% of the gross domestic product and approximately 15% of the population. Around 500,000 houses are concentrated in these two cities, and 70% of those are believed to not have complied with Bangladesh National Building Code.
Thursday, June 04, 2026
