November 25, 2025
DHAKA – When the ground shook violently on November 21, the city’s seismic assessment system was, quite literally, locked. For 16 months, the Urban Safety and Resilience Institute (USRI) in Mohakhali has stood as a 10-storey monument to waste.
Completed in June 2024 and funded by the World Bank, the Tk 250 crore facility was meant to be the capital’s seismic sentinel. Yet, while the fault lines have been active, the bureaucracy has remained comatose.
The problem is not a lack of expertise, but the absence of paperwork. Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakkha (Rajuk), the capital’s development authority, claims it has been waiting for ministry approval to operationalise a “deed of trust.”
Only after last weekend’s triple shock did Rajuk hurriedly send the necessary files to the housing and public works ministry, as this newspaper reports. It is a classic case of administrative reflex: a flurry of paper-pushing that begins only after the crisis has arrived.
In geology, stasis is usually reassuring. In governance, it is dangerous. Dhaka’s residents were reminded of this on Friday, when a magnitude 5.7 earthquake struck Madhabdi, just outside the teeming capital.
It was the strongest tremor in decades—cracking walls, claiming at least 10 lives, and sending lakhs into the streets. But the earth had more to say.
Over the next 32 hours, two additional tremors followed, including a magnitude 3.7 jolt in Badda, a dense neighbourhood at the city’s core.
Nerves are frayed. Yet, the nation’s earthquake preparedness remains stuck in the shivering inaction that paralyses USRI, the very institution designed to safeguard the public.
Inside the building sits a laboratory stocked with European gadgetry—terrestrial laser scanners, ground-penetrating radar, tri-axial testing systems.
These machines can peer into concrete beams and count rebar without scratching the paint.
They are the difference between knowing a building will stand and simply hoping it will. The timing makes the negligence even starker.
Dhaka’s sprawling periphery rests on soft alluvial soil that amplifies seismic waves; it is a vertical city built on hope and, too often, dubious concrete.
A pilot assessment under the project examined some 3,250 schools and hospitals, identifying 42 buildings needing immediate demolition and 200 requiring retrofitting. Extrapolate that across a metropolis of over two crore people—where rapid urbanisation has easily outpaced regulation—and the scale of vulnerability becomes painfully clear.
Leaving these diagnostic tools unused at USRI while the ground moves beneath us is both negligent and dangerous.
High-tech equipment atrophies when idle. The sensors and scanners at USRI have already missed a year of maintenance.
Still, the Rajuk chairman insists he is “very positive” that the institute will launch now that the paperwork is moving. One hopes so.
But earthquakes do not wait for bureaucrats to approve deeds of trust. If we want to survive the “big one,” we must understand that resilience requires more than constructing a building or purchasing expensive equipment; it demands that the equipment is switched on.