BWDB Engineers Trained on Quality Control and Construction Management — QA/QC Standards, Material Testing and NDT

Management and Training International (MTI) Ltd. conducted the two-day training course on Quality Control and Construction Management — Quality Assurance (QA) and Quality Control (QC) Standards, Material Testing, Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) Methods and BWDB Guidelines on Quality Control on 9 and 10 September 2026 at the Central ICT Lab, Level-11, Pani Bhaban, BWDB, Dhaka. Twenty-five officials of the Bangladesh Water Development Board (BWDB), under the Ministry of Water Resources, took part — the sixth batch under Package 22 of the Climate-Smart Agriculture and Water Management Project (CSAWM Project), BWDB Part, and the first in the programme’s quality-control discipline.

Quality Is Decided on Site, Not in the Drawing

An embankment designed to a safe slope fails if its soil was placed too wet and never compacted to design density. A regulator’s concrete specified for 25 MPa may reach half that if the aggregate was dirty or the curing was skipped. Reinforcement that looks right on delivery can hide laminations a magnetic-particle test would have found. Most of what goes wrong with BWDB structures is decided in the weeks of construction, by whether someone tested what they were told to test.

This course was built around that inspection discipline. Day 1 set out what quality means and how it is proved — QA versus QC, ISO, ASTM and BSTI standards, documentation, then testing of soil, concrete, steel, aggregate and bitumen. Day 2 went to what can be tested in place — ultrasonic pulse velocity, the rebound hammer, radiography, magnetic particles and thermography — and closed on BWDB’s own quality-control guidelines for earthwork, concrete, welding, safety and the environment.

Resource Persons

Four senior BWDB engineers delivered the eight sessions in pairs, each taking one block. Two Superintending Engineers from the Design & Research Circles took QA/QC standards and the BWDB guidelines; the Additional Chief Engineer for Dam & Barrage took non-destructive testing; and an Executive Engineer from Design & Research Circle-2 took material testing. That last resource person, A F M Tauhid Jaman, had been a participant in the Package 21 O&M and Exit Strategy course only a week earlier — a small sign of the programme building a cadre that teaches as well as learns.

Course Leadership

Eight Sessions, Four Lines of Defence

Day-by-Day Course Schedule

Participants reported to the Central ICT Lab at 08:30 on the first morning and at 09:00 on the second. Each day ran four sessions and closed at 16:00.

Training Methodology

The sessions combined presentation with field photographs and worked cross-sections on the lab screen, and set aside time in every block for experience sharing — most of the cohort supervise construction and had their own examples of tests that were skipped or results that were ignored. The guidelines sessions closed with a case study.

Group Presentations

On the closing afternoon participants presented in groups at the front of the lab, reporting back on the standards, tests and guidelines covered in the two days.

Who Was in the Room

Seventeen of the twenty-five participants were engineers — three Executive Engineers, five Sub-Divisional Engineers and nine Assistant Engineers — drawn from Design Circles 4, 5 and 7, the Contract and Procurement Cell, the Ganges Barrage Study Project, the Directorates of Processing and Planning-3, the Office of the Chief Engineer, Monitoring, the Joint Rivers Commission and the CSAWM Project itself. Four finance and audit officers, two Assistant Directors (Admin), a Sub-Assistant Engineer and a Work Assistant completed the cohort; five travelled in from Narayanganj, Chandpur, Rajshahi and Narsingdi. Nineteen offices were represented in all.

Full Participant Roster

Closing Ceremony & Certification

The Project Director closed the course on the afternoon of 10 September 2026. After the post-evaluation and course evaluation, certificates were presented to the participants at the dais.

The Course in Pictures

Sixteen further photographs from the two days at the Central ICT Lab, Pani Bhaban.

Why This Matters

Climate-resilient infrastructure is only resilient if it is built to specification. A polder rehabilitated under the Climate-Smart Agriculture and Water Management Project will be judged by how it stands up to a surge or a flood season, and that depends on compaction tests, concrete cubes and steel certificates that nobody outside the project will ever see.

By teaching QA and QC as a system — standards, documentation, laboratory testing, in-place testing and BWDB’s own guidelines — to the design and field engineers who sign off construction, and by putting finance and audit staff in the same room, the course strengthens the part of project delivery that decides whether the investment lasts.

More from this Programme

Programme Snapshot

Frequently Asked Questions