Department of Inspection for Factories and Establishments

The DIFE is currently balancing the rigorous enforcement of labour laws with the need to simplify regulatory processes, such as the transition to five-year licence renewals, while addressing capacity and logistical constraints.

Established 1969 as Directorate of Inspection for Factories and Establishments under ILO Convention No. 81 and Bangladesh's Labour Policy of 1969; upgraded to Department status on 15 January 2014 with creation of 679 new revenue-budget posts. Sanctioned strength is 1,156 (revised organogram approved 2021-22) across headquarters and 31 district offices; active inspector count is approximately 554 with 122 further appointments in process as of April 2026 -- a deployment gap that constrains proactive inspection of 83,591 listed establishments. The head_role is Inspector General (IG); no publicly verifiable current IG name was identified in cross-checked sources as of the verification date, so current_head is null. The annual_budget_bdt field is null because DIFE's sub-allocation within the Ministry of Labour and Employment's Tk 438 crore FY2025-26 budget is not broken out in publicly accessible documents; the ministry total is noted in budget_actions instead. The verification_status is 'partial' on that basis and because the current IG identity could not be confirmed from two primary sources. The LIMA digital inspection platform (launched 2018 with ILO support, including three servers and 250 Android tablets) is the operative licensing and inspection management system; paper licences were fully phased out in FY2025-26. The RMG Sustainability Council (RSC) and DIFE's Remediation Coordination Cell (RCC) remain the joint oversight mechanism for the post-Accord/Alliance factory safety database; factories exited from RSC coverage have their full structural, electrical, and fire inspection reports transferred to DIFE.