NEW DELHI — Amid an international outcry and promises by retailers to improve worker safety, Bangladesh is struggling to conduct even a crude assessment of the country’s garment factories.
To appreciate the difficulty, spend a day with Mohammed Helal Ahmed, 42, a civil engineer in Dhaka city government, as he struggles through cursory factory inspections.
His day starts with a decrepit government car that breaks down and a list of misspelled factory names with partial addresses.
Factory owners deny him entry and stall for time. He encounters blocked fire exits, roofs sagging under heavy water tanks, and former apartment buildings that have been joined haphazardly. Workers whisper about cracks in walls, only to be shushed by security guards.
‘‘It is completely unbelievable,’’ Ahmed said at sundown, sweat pouring off his forehead after surveying four of the seven factories that had been on the day’s agenda. ‘‘So much work is needed immediately. Real action is needed.’’
Until such action is taken, Ahmed and his 50 colleagues at the Dhaka Development Authority are mostly compiling data in a superficial survey of the city’s factories. Even this basic step is hobbled by shortages of cars, engineers, money, and information, emphasizing that efforts to oversee improvements cannot depend on the Bangladeshi government’s limited resources.
Instead, any attempt to improve safety conditions for Bangladesh’s 3 million garment workers will live and die on a coalition including retailers and unions that was cobbled together in the weeks after the horror of Rana Plaza.
Ahmed’s surveys are a first round in a process to improve safety in an effort to avoid disasters like Rana Plaza, the factory building that collapsed and killed 1,127 people in April.
In two weeks, Ahmed and his colleagues at the Dhaka Development Authority have surveyed about 300 of more than 3,500 factories in the sprawling capital of 18 million people.
About 90 percent of those visited evoked serious concerns, warranting immediate repairs or demolitions, said Emdadul Islam, chief engineer at the authority. About 1,500 more factories outside the city lie in a no-man’s land of jurisdictional confusion, he added.
The surveys are supposed to be followed by full inspections, including tests of steel beams and concrete, and then finally plans for remediation, if resources can be found. For now, all that the local officials want to do is build a database that includes every factory, to collect photocopies of building plans and approvals, and to eye the situation.
‘‘For evaluation we need experts,’’ said Tarek Uddin Mohammed, a civil engineering professor at the University of Asia Pacific in Dhaka. ‘‘The government doesn’t have the necessary work force.’’
Discussions continue far from Dhaka, in places such as Geneva and Frankfurt, among union leaders and retailers about the best ways of distributing money, and for working with local officials.
A group of more than 39 retailers, mostly European, have pledged as much as $500,000 each for five consecutivet years in one major fire and safety monitoring agreement. They have also agreed to pay for upgrades with suppliers.
At a May 23 meeting in Geneva, the International Labor Organization together with retailers discussed hiring a safety inspector and team, and pinpointed factories with urgent needs under that agreement, which will cover 2,000 factories, according to Christy Hoffman, deputy general secretary of UNI Global Union.
Though unlikely to start in June, inspections will begin in the coming months, she said.
Five years of renovations and retrofits could cost Western retailers and Bangladesh owners as much as $600,000 a factory, or $3 billion during the next five years, according to an estimate by the Workers Right Consortium of Washington.