The closure of over 200 garment factories, primarily small knitting and dyeing units, across Narayanganj has triggered a socio-economic disaster, transforming a labor crisis into an alarming law-and-order threat. With up to 50,000 workers estimated to be jobless, authorities are linking the mass unemployment to a sharp increase in theft, drug trafficking, and petty crimes.

Narayanganj is a crucial specialized node within Bangladesh's Ready-Made Garment (RMG) sector, an industry that dominates the nation's economy and contributes over 80% of its export earnings. The factories shut down largely focus on high-volume knitwear and dyeing, supplying essential product lines to major global brands. Factory owners, struggling to survive, blame the crisis on a combination of external and internal pressures. They cite "unethical buying practices" by international retailers who exploit suppliers by demanding short sales cycles and refusing to pay fair, full prices. Simultaneously, they face crippling domestic costs, particularly utility inflation, including a recent 33% gas price hike that decimated operating margins for the energy-intensive dyeing and processing plants. This domestic cost pressure, coupled with a persistent global order crisis, has made these smaller, less-resourced factories financially untenable. While the broader national RMG market is forecast for growth, the closures reveal a major rift: larger, technologically advanced, and green-certified factories, which benefit from a reduced 10% corporate tax rate, are absorbing market share and concentrating wealth, effectively pushing the smaller, less compliant units toward systemic collapse. The government's future-focused industrial plan prioritizes automation and efficiency over pure wage arbitrage, a transition that has severely disadvantaged the massive, unskilled workforce that is now on the streets.