EVERYTHING that could go wrong with Gul Plaza did go wrong, just as it had in the Baldia factory fire of 2012. Between these two tragic milestones, the city witnessed another 18,000 fire accidents which failed to garner the attention they deserved. No one speaks about the 12,000 fatalities that occur every year, due to industrial fires, boiler explosions, suffocation, hazardous materials and entry into gutters in Pakistan. Building collapses claimed over 150 lives in urban Karachi, while more than 500 coal miners died in mining accidents during the past five years. At least 180 persons lost their lives in train accidents in the last 10 years — as against four in the UK and none in Japan during the same period. The contrast is not just statistical. It is a stark indictment of missing safety systems, governance and accountability.
The government follows a predictable three-step script after every major accident. First, it hastily identifies a scapegoat — in Gul Plaza’s case, a small child; second, it announces compensation for victims — in Gul Plaza’s case Rs1 crore per victim (to be paid by the taxpayers); and third, it orders a judicial inquiry — to help the tragedy fade from public memory.
It requires no sophisticated analysis to conclude that tragedies like Gul Plaza will continue to occur with disturbing regularity. Over the past 78 years, Pakistan failed to establish even a rudimentary occupational safety and health system or institution at the national or provincial level. Isolated half-baked regulations or codes do not make an OSH system or organisation.
The US has OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration), a federal agency with total responsibility for workplace safety. The UK’s Health & Safety Executive and British Columbia’s WorkSafeBC are yet other examples of national and provincial safety organisations that bear the overall responsibility for health and safety at the workplace.
Incidents like the Gul Plaza fire will continue to occur.
It is time for Pakistan to establish a national ‘OSH Authority’ to prevent accidents and promote safety practices. This organisation must have complete authority for setting legally binding health and safety standards and regulations; inspecting buildings and workplaces to ensure compliance with safety laws; investigating serious workplace accidents and deaths; enforcing compliance and imposing penalties for non-compliance; collecting premiums from employers to fund workers’ compensation systems and providing training and education.
Accident investigations play a vital role in preventing future accidents. It is counterproductive to appoint bureaucrats or judges who know nothing about OSH or accident investigation to perform this task. Such investigations are mostly seeking a low-level worker to blame. Machine operators, drivers, labourers and security guards are often the most vulnerable contestants, while signalmen invariably end up being blamed for train accidents. This is witch-hunting and not accident investigation.
Such blame-oriented investigations primarily focus on determining ‘direct causes’. These may be unsafe acts such as smoking near flammable materials or unsafe conditions such as exposed electrical wiring or blocked fire exits. Meanwhile, the more serious ‘underlying causes’ such as inadequate safety training, poor maintenance and deficient risk assessment are conveniently pushed into the background. The most damaging and consistent flaw of such bureaucratic investigations is their failure to uncover the ‘root causes’, which typically lie in the shortcomings of the senior management. Incompetent governance, poor leadership, absence of an OSH management system, corrupt practices in approvals and procurement, ineffective enforcement of safety regulations and lack of audits and accountability are often the root causes, rarely identified or acknowledged. No wonder that a chief executive in Pakistan has never been sentenced to jail for a safety accident, while scores of such examples exist in the Western world.
In most developed countries, corporations face heavy penalties after fatal accidents, and senior executives often step down. Dave Calhoun, Boeing’s CEO, resigned after a mid-air door panel blowout. Masataka Shimizu, CEO of Tokyo Electric Power, stepped down following the Fukushima nuclear disaster. In 2023, the head of General Motors’ Cruise Vehicle Unit voluntarily resigned after a self-driving taxi accident with a pedestrian. If we are unwilling to uphold comparable standards of accountability and ethics, can we at least agree to end the inhuman and unsafe practice of forcing sanitation workers to descend into raw sewage gutters and remove our collective filth with their bare hands?
The writer is an industrial engineer and a volunteer social activist.
Published in Dawn, February 9th, 2026