Prospects and Challenges of Structural Steel Construction in Bangladesh: A Critical Review

Abstract

Structural steel has moved from a colonial-era import used almost exclusively in railway bridges to a mainstream construction material underpinning Bangladesh's most visible contemporary infrastructure, including the Padma Multipurpose Bridge, the Dhaka Metro Rail, and the Payra Port jetty. This review synthesizes the historical development, present industrial capacity, and principal barriers facing structural steel construction in Bangladesh, drawing on the construction-management, structural-engineering, and materials-science literature together with sector data on production, consumption, and trade. The domestic steel industry has grown from a single re-rolling mill in 1952 to an installed capacity exceeding 9 million metric tons, driven by sustained GDP growth, urbanization, and government infrastructure spending; per-capita steel consumption nearly doubled between 2012 and the early 2020s. However, this capacity expansion has outpaced the institutional infrastructure needed to manage it safely: raw-material price volatility, heavy dependence on imported billet and scrap, recurrent fire losses linked to the strength degradation of steel at elevated temperature, corrosion in a humid riverine and coastal climate, weak enforcement of the Bangladesh National Building Code and Labor Act, and a shortage of specialized fabrication and erection skills together constrain the sector's growth. The review's principal contribution is an integrated challenge–response synthesis that maps each barrier to its underlying cause, its practical consequence, and the responsible stakeholder, showing that Bangladesh's steel sector is presently capacity-rich but institutionally under-developed relative to the safety and quality-assurance systems that mature steel-construction markets rely upon. Targeted recommendations — including mandatory performance-based fire-engineering checks for critical steel-framed occupancies, a national skills-certification scheme for steel fabrication and erection, and diversification of raw-material sourcing — are proposed to close this gap and to sustain the sector's growth trajectory over the coming decade.