Karigor: the room that hides her

Bangladesh's garment industry employs about three million workers, a slim majority of them women, and the law already mandates a medical room scaled to the workforce. The published assessment is consistent: the rooms exist on paper, for the buyer audit, and the workers do not use them. The reasons are documented, and the sharpest is this. Pregnancy concealment is a known exit driver, because women have watched what happens to those who tell. A worker will buy Panadol and keep sewing rather than walk into a room she does not trust.

So the factory medical room has a contradiction at its heart. The factory pays for it and wants proof it is used. The worker will only use it if what she says inside cannot reach the factory. A normal record cannot satisfy both. A factory-readable health record, in a sector where pregnancy discrimination drives women out, is a weapon aimed at the people it claims to serve.

Karigor resolves the contradiction with the spine, not a policy promise. The room is staffed by a trained health assistant with a tablet, and every encounter writes to the worker's own wallet, under her key, on a device the factory cannot read. Her early-pregnancy consultation is a shielded category, visible to her and the clinicians she chooses and to no one else. What management receives is what it actually needs and the buyer audits: signed compliance credentials and de-identified aggregates, the room is staffed, the encounters are happening, never an individual record.

This is the patient who must not be named, given a place to work. The same machinery that hides her from her employer is the machinery the employer paid for, and that is not a contradiction the design tolerates; it is the design. And when she leaves at thirty-five, her decade of occupational health history leaves with her, because it was always hers. Karigor is not a special confidential product. It is patient-held keys, pointed at the one place a health record is most likely to be turned against the patient.