The textile industry in Bangladesh has been a great engine for boosting economic growth in the country. However, with great success came environmental deterioration. Untreated effluents containing heavy metals are being released into rivers from nearby factories, affecting the health of people who live along the polluted rivers. The existing law in Bangladesh, requiring such factories to install an effluent treatment plant (ETP), has not been effective in reducing environmental noncompliance. This paper aims to investigate the reality of the situation that the textile industry faces regarding environmental compliance. It is based on primary data collected from textile factories in Dhaka through a questionnaire survey with complementary interviews. This study especially highlights the barriers and difficulties faced by factories in the installation and operation of ETPs. The results confirm previous findings: Low willingness of companies to meet environmental compliance requirements and inadequate monitoring and enforcement by government authorities. In addition, we reveal that the dominant barriers to ETP installation are at the purchase stage, rather than the construction stage: ETPs are unavailable in local markets and the import tax is high. Institutional arrangements are required to improve this situation; this could include establishing a subsidy scheme that would encourage voluntary construction of central ETPs. We suggest that external pressure is essential for Bangladesh to change and the external bodies exerting such pressure should have objective measures by which to judge compliance; the quality of river water might be the only reliable measure of environmental compliance in this situation.

Bangladesh is one of the high-risk countries of the COVID-19 pandemic and its consequent losses due to social and economic conditions. There is a significant possibility that economic stagnation would push a large population back into poverty. In the present study, we have reviewed the chronology and epidemiology of COVID-19 in Bangladesh and investigated the country’s vulnerabilities concerning COVID-19 impacts. We focused primarily on four areas of vulnerabilities in Bangladesh: The garment industry, urban slums, social exclusion, and pre-existing health conditions. The result implicated that the country would take time to recover its economy due to the vulnerabilities mentioned above, and many people in Bangladesh would not be able to tolerate the current situation because they do not have enough reserves to do so. We concluded that if at least some Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) had been at least partly attained, the situation would not be as dire as it is now. Based on this conclusion, we suggested a tolerance capacity to indicate how long people can survive without outside support. It is a holistic assessment rather than the indicators presently defined in each SDG, but it should be attained through a harmonized approach to SDGs.