Editorial
The fire at NCTB warehouse
Emergency steps necessary to keep to textbook schedule
THE devastating fire which broke out at the warehouse of the National Curriculum and Textbook Board on Sunday raises a number of questions about how it happened and what lessons can be learned from it. That a fire could occur at such an important place, one which has a direct link with education, is certainly beyond the imagination. Naturally, therefore, the first question which springs to mind relates to the presence or otherwise of adequate fire fighting equipment in the warehouse. Given the fact that till yesterday the fire could not be put out fully, one can reasonably guess that the NCTB warehouse did not have any equipment it could employ to limit the damage caused by the conflagration. And so from our question we move on to another: how is it that in all these years no one gave a thought to the necessary fire fighting equipment that might be needed at some point? When a building houses important documents and papers (and the NCTB is surely that), it should have been for the authorities to have such precautions in place.
The devastation, as we understand from news reports, is complete. Of the 1,700 tons of paper stored in the warehouse for purposes of textbook production, most have been gutted or badly damaged by the fire. That can only mean that the 190,000,000 books that are printed and distributed every year by the NCTB authorities now have a huge question mark before them. When in normal circumstances, the printing and distribution of textbooks is delayed every academic year by anywhere from two to three months, it is hard to see how the NCTB authorities will tide over this new crisis and go on to make books available to students on time next year. To be sure, Education Minister Nurul Islam Nahid has reassured the country that the normal distribution of the textbooks will not be hampered despite the fire. Even so, one does not quite see how the crisis can be tided over. Emergency measures certainly need to be put in place for the authorities to meet the deadline, but precisely what the nature of those measures will be remains a question. It is extremely important that the minister's reassurance be backed up by round the clock work to tide over the problem and convince educational institutions that they need have no apprehension about the situation.
That said, a full and meaningful inquiry into the cause of the fire is in order. There are some glaring gaps, those which may have ignited the fire, that must be brought within the purview of the inquiry. The absence of fire fighting equipment is of course one of them. As for the fire spreading to all corners of the warehouse, one reason appears to be the thickness in which the stacks of paper were kept in the warehouse. Clearly no gap or space was there between one stack and another, which made it easy for the fire to leap from one spot to another. In other words, skilled arrangement of materials has been made conspicuous by its absence. No in-built system, be it about fire fighting or arranging materials, was there.
Finally, it becomes necessary now to see if any sabotage was involved. And that naturally raises the question of how much security was there to make the NCTB warehouse safe from dangers of all kinds.
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