Tk 6.20b Japanese fund for public, private building retrofitting

Munima Sultana | Published: July 26, 2015 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2024 06:01:00

A new window of 10 billion Japanese Yen (Tk 6.20 billion) fund will be opened under the Bangladesh Bank as Japanese support for retrofitting public and private buildings for a disaster-resilient city.
The earthquake disaster risk index has placed Dhaka among the 20 most vulnerable cities in the world.
Officials said the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), the lending agency of the Japanese government, has already approved the Urban Building Safety (UBS) project and a loan agreement in this regard is likely to be signed in the next Official Development Assistance (ODA).
This is the extended part of the JICA's support project of the Public Works Department under which retrofitting of some public buildings and capacity building of PWD were completed, they added.
"So far retrofitting of some public buildings was conducted. Support to some readymade garment factories has been given under the Bangladesh Bank's Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) fund. Now JICA-supported new window will be opened for all kinds of buildings including RMG, private and individual buildings," said an official of the central bank.
Â He said the support given to the RMG sector will be merged with the new window named Urban Building Safety.
The JICA has already given Tk 1.0 billion to carry out retrofitting of readymade garment (RMG) factories after the Rana Plaza building collapse which, however, could not receive good response from the beneficiary groups due to various reasons. These include severe deviation of the structural design of majority RMG units from the Bangladesh National Building Code (BNBC) and default of loans.
Sources said a JICA study team conducted field survey last year and took the decision to extend its support in the area of disaster reduction enhancing the building safety both in private and public sectors.
The JICA-supported PWD project named 'CNCRP' carried out concrete core tests on buildings and found that only 25 per cent buildings satisfy the earthquake resistance as stipulated in the BNBC.
Most buildings fell short of the design strength and even structural design is not proper. Buildings may be categorised as 'structurally problematic', the study report said.
When asked how support to private and public buildings would be provided, a PWD official said Japanese consultants would support the technical aspects including design, drawing and assessment to guide the clients of retrofitting measures.
He, however, said the PWD capacity which was developed through CNCRP could not support the country's massive demand for the work.
The CNCRP activities conducted during 2011-2015 included creation of a building inventory, study on suitable seismic resistant methods, development of new construction and seismic retrofitting design manuals complying with the BNBC, improvement of construction management and quality control, and training of engineers in earthquake engineering fields.
Since Bangladesh does not have data on existing public and private buildings, laboratory tests of core samples were carried out to get an idea of concrete strength.
A pilot project at Tejgoan fire station was implemented creating a chance for the PWD engineers to implement their gained knowledge in the field.
The JICA's support to RMG factories after the Rana Plaza incident through a loan project was to use seismic retrofitting technology of CNCRP in response to request from joint associations of RMG sector i.e. BGMEA and BKMEA.
In total, 218 factory owners showed interest for the loan. However, after a thorough screening process, only 12 owners remained for seismic design. Finally, two factories, namely DK and Purple were selected for the first stage of RMG loan project implementation.
Bangladesh faces floods and tropical cyclones. Though Dhaka never had any experience of big earthquakes in last 100 years, records show that there were big ones that had struck Bangladesh a century ago.
smunima@yahoo.com