DHAKA: After hours of digging in the ruins of Rana Plaza, rescuers heard a voice: Pakhi Begum, 25, her legs pinned under a mountain of concrete.

Escape seemed near that afternoon of April 24, hours after the eight-storey building where she worked outside Bangladesh’s capital collapsed, especially when so many more had died — more than 600 at last count. But before she could be rescued, Pakhi, whose name means little bird, faced a life-altering decision: she could be freed only if rescuers hacked off her legs.

She begged for hours. The rescue team said no. The army, which was leading search operations, was brought in. Then a machete was brandished.

Begum’s trajectory mirrors that of Bangladesh’s $18 billion garment industry, one whose messy, exuberant growth has provided opportunities for millions of poor, illiterate women while placing their lives at risk. Touted as a symbol of empowerment by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, it is the only road out of grinding poverty for many.

And yet, the industry fattens profit margins at western retailers while women are forced to work in unsafe jobs that rob them of their health and dignity.

Bangladesh is “still a desperately poor country, and we shouldn’t minimise what a steady job with a steady cheque means to a poor woman”.

The garment industry has been a rare glimmer of growth in a country once described by former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger as a “basket case”. Bangladesh has seen three major coups and two dozen smaller rebellions since 1971 and ranks 130 out of 139 countries for its roads, power and ports, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report.

By 2005, global trade agreements limiting the number of garments individual countries could export to the European Union and the United States started to expire. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund predicted Bangladesh’s exports of garments would wilt under an onslaught of cheap Chinese goods.

Instead, Bangladesh’s exports tripled between 2005 and 2010, and are expected to triple again by 2020 to almost $50 billion a year, McKinsey and Co estimates. The secret has been low wages. Average monthly pay in 2009 for workers in Dhaka was $47, versus $235 in Shenzhen and $100 in Hanoi, according to the Japan External Trade Organisation.

By 2010, Bangladesh had about 5,000 garment factories, second only to China and more than twice the number in Indonesia and Vietnam, according to McKinsey.

“They are undercutting each other over two to three billion dollars of new business each year,” said Kasra Ferdows, a professor of operations management at Georgetown University who has advised retailers like Zara. “It creates a dog-eat-dog business where there are a lot people on the margins who will cut corners.”

For Pakhi Begum, the boom in garment exports couldn’t have come at a better time. In 2008, she and her husband, Jahangir Fakir, ran out of money. Living in Khulna, Fakir had struggled to make a living. A business selling bananas had failed. So had one selling shrimps. Dhaka offered escape.

Both got jobs in the garment industry, at a company called Hallmark Group. Pay was low, says Fakir, and the hours stretched into the night. Four years later, Hallmark was investigated for financial fraud that included $340 million in loans given by a local bank, and it was shut down.

In search of a new job, Pakhi ended up at a company called Ether Textiles. At least six days a week, on the fifth floor of a building called Rana Plaza, where Ether Textiles rented a floor, she would hunch over a sewing machine for as long as 14 hours a day, making jeans and shorts. Executives from Ether Textiles weren’t available to comment on working conditions.

UNLAWFUL CONSTRUCTION: Unbeknownst to her, the building was illegal, its owner a gun-toting local politician who had obtained permits from the mayor, instead of local building authorities, to construct the glass-fronted factory complex on a swamp.

Pakhi earned more than her husband, sometimes bringing home as much as $115 a month, including overtime, during the peak delivery period leading up to the summer.

On April 23 (a day before the tragedy), Rana Plaza developed cracks. The next day Fakir begged his wife not to go to work. She agreed, and after he left for work at another garment factory, Pakhi called in and asked for the day off. Her manager told her a month’s salary would be withheld if she didn’t show up, she said, lapsing in and out of consciousness in her hospital bed. Losing a month’s pay was too big a risk. Though there was a strike that day and public transport was difficult, Pakhi got to work on time.

Almost 400 people worked on her floor, all employees of Ether Textiles, whose website has been pulled down. Its owner has been arrested and its customers remain unknown. When Pakhi again begged her manager for the day off, she said, his answer was a series of unprintable insults.

Hours later, Pakhi was begging for her life. She remembers that two of the rescuers returned with a large, broad knife. They had spent precious time scrabbling in the debris with their bare hands, unable to free her legs. They started chopping.

All around her were screams of pain. She says she doesn’t remember much of what came afterwards, waking up in a hospital, her husband’s cell phone number scrawled on the wall, her legs gone. She was one of the earliest survivors pulled alive from the building, a number that eventually topped 1,500.

Before rescue operations ended, the death toll would climb to 617, and earthmovers would be called in to scrape through the twisted metal and concrete for bodies. On Friday, as the Bangladesh government agreed to International Labour Organization’s proposals that include worker protection and the right to unions, her husband sat across from the hospital, contemplating what’s next.

“My life in my small village was better than this,” he said. “Here, there’s too much pain for me to bear.”

By arrangement with Washington Post-Bloomberg News Service