On the evening of 25 November 2025, as daylight faded over Dhaka, a familiar terror returned to Korail, one of the largest and most densely populated informal settlements in Dhaka. A fire broke out around 5.20 pm and raged for hours, destroying hundreds of homes before fire-fighters could bring it under control late at night. By then, entire sections of Korail had already turned to ash, leaving families staring at the burned remains of their lives.
For the residents, many of whom work as domestic helpers, rickshaw pullers, garment workers, small vendors or drivers, this was not just a fire: it was the reminder of a governance system that continually fails to protect those it depends on the most.
Residents recalled that the fire spread ‘within minutes’. Narrow walkways, densely packed homes, shared electric lines, flammable cooking-gas cylinders, and limited water access created a perfect environment for a small fire to become a massive crisis. Fire service units struggled to enter the settlement, losing precious time navigating traffic, crowds, and the physical layout of Korail. By the time they gained access, the flames had already consumed large clusters of homes.
A disaster that was waiting to happen
Slum fires in Dhaka are routinely explained through technical language: gas cylinders, cooking stoves, faulty wiring or electrical overload. But these explanations conceal more than they reveal. There is still no official conclusion about what caused the fire, but the cause almost feels secondary. Whether the fire began from a faulty wire or a cooking stove, the conditions that turned it into a disaster were systematic. The real question is not how the fire started, but why thousands of people remain trapped in conditions where fire spreads within minutes and escape routes barely exist.
Informality as urban policy, not urban failure
Korail has existed for decades, housing the labour that keeps Dhaka functioning. Yet, it remains legally invisible with the residents living without tenure or formal rights to build or improve their homes, and prone to eviction. This legal ambiguity is often described as failure or neglect, but in practice it serves a political purpose.
Informality allows the state to deny responsibility while maintaining control. This marginalises the residents and creates dependency on intermediaries (local leaders, utility brokers and political actors) who provide access to water, electricity and housing through informal arrangements. This network of patronage embeds slum residents within systems of clientelism that are far more politically effective than formal inclusion would ever be.
The political geography of safety
The vulnerability of Korail to fire is not accidental. It is manufactured through systematic underinvestment.
In Dhaka’s affluent neighbourhoods, the streets are wide, utilities are regulated and emergency access is predictable. In Korail, however, fire service units struggle to enter at all and there are no formal water points for fire service units to work. Electrical wiring is unsafe because residents rely on improvised connections in a vacuum of regulation. Risk is not evenly distributed in this city: it follows class and political visibility.
Corruption, visibility and the politics of urban investment
This inequity is further reinforced by corruption, not only through embezzlement and rent-seeking, but also through routine decisions about where public funds flow, and where it does not.
Public investment in Dhaka flows heavily into expressways, flyovers, commercial hubs and beautification schemes. Sadly, fire prevention in informal settlements rarely offers similar political returns. There is no prestige attached to rewiring slum electricity lines, and no obvious patronage potential in disaster-proofing those with no formal political voice. As a result, urban infrastructure becomes a reflection of political value rather than public need. Dhaka becomes a city where modern development exists alongside manufactured vulnerability, often only metres apart.
Governing without responsibility
Institutional fragmentation deepens this failure. Korail sits within overlapping jurisdiction of multiple agencies such as Dhaka North City Corporation or RAJUK, yet in practice, not one institution takes responsibility for its safety. Each agency can claim limited authority; each can redirect blame elsewhere. This architecture of shared responsibility produces, in reality, a vacuum of accountability. Post-fire inquiries, when they occur, rarely lead to structural reform. Reports are not public, culpability is not established, and policy remains untouched. What emerges is not bureaucratic confusion alone but institutionalised impunity.
After each disaster, aid arrives. Blankets, food, plastic sheets, and political sympathy follow predictable patterns. Then attention fades, and Korail is rebuilt exactly as it was before: packed and vulnerable. Families reconstruct homes with the same combustible materials. Unsafe electricity is restored through the same informal routes. Risk is not reduced; it is simply reset. While this is routinely described as recovery, it is in reality, the reproduction of vulnerability.
What would accountability actually look like?
If governance in Dhaka was serious about preventing future Korails, it would begin with recognition. Informal settlements would be acknowledged as permanent features of the city, not temporary mistakes. Tenure would not be treated as a political concession but as an enabler of safety. Fire prevention would be embedded within urban infrastructure planning, rather than outsourced to emergency response. Corruption in city planning would be addressed institutionally, through audits that track spending patterns and whose lives public investments is designed to protect. Communities would no longer be treated as recipients of relief, but as citizens with the right to shape their environment. What is missing is not technical capacity, but political will.
Korail burns not because residents are careless, but because they are governed without care. It burns because informality remains profitable, inequality remains administratively convenient, and accountability remains optional. It burns because power in Dhaka has never paid a price for allowing it. Until safety becomes politically unavoidable, until urban corruption becomes personally costly, and until informality stops being a tool of control, Korail will burn again.
And when it does, we will call it another accident.
It will not be.
It will be policy, unfolding exactly as designed.
About the author
Wafa Alam is a Senior Research Fellow, BRAC James P Grant School of Public Health, BRAC University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. She was a Chevening Scholar (2024/2025) and studied the MA Governance, Development and Public Policy at IDS (Class of 2024-25).
