The Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety has called upon RMG factory owners to avoid engaging engineering consultancy firms Grihayan Rit Consortium, Uttaron Technologies and Space Design & Development from carrying out detailed engineering assessments (DEA) of their concerned units, whom the platform of major North American brands and retailers have accused of employing “unethical engineering practices” while carrying out DEA of factories inspected earlier by Alliance.
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The Alliance has accused the firms of manipulating test reports, negotiating with factory owners to avoid retrofitting and tempering concrete core test reports. It reportedly also accused the three firms of harassing factory owners, besides submitting erroneous DEA reports.
According to the buyers’ platform, Uttaron Technologies had no permanent staff, and it was engaging diploma engineers for the task. “The firm is incapable of doing cost-effective retrofitting solution and the tendency of the company is to get benefit with low expenses avoiding professionalism,” Alliance reportedly observed, underlining that as far as Grihayan Rit Consortium is concerned, it has no experienced engineers to perform DEA and retrofitting design and lacks professional attitude towards solving design-related problems in garment factories.
Alliance further alleged that Grihayan Rit Consortium manipulated material test reports and tempered concrete core test reports prepared by BUET besides misleading the factories by giving false hopes of getting proper assessments.
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The North American retailers’ body also claimed that Space Design & Development had no professional engineers to perform DEA and retrofitting design and lacked professional attitude towards performing DEA keeping with the Alliance’s guidelines.
