COVID-19 crisis calls for a paradigm shift in public health policies

Suvek Salankar, Head- Fire & Safety, Rustomjee Constructions talks about the current occupational safety and health scenario in India and its comparison to global standards, key challenges related to implementing safety regulations within a large organisation, given the COVID-19 pandemic, what more does the government needs to do to help improve OSH awareness and provides advice to large occupational safety and health shows such as OSH India to help further the cause of spreading awareness about safety in Indian organisations.

Interviewed by Adeesh Sharma

Q 1: What is your assessment about the current occupational safety and health scenario in India? How does it compare to global standards?

We know that India is fast growing economy and world's largest democracy with huge population of almost 1.3 billion. Out of this, almost 64 % is working age group. More than 90% is a part of unorganised sector and less than 10% is part of organized sector. New service industries like Information Technology, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) are increasing rapidly and so is the proportion of females in the workforce.

The occupational safety and health (OSH) scenario in India are relatively complex. Here growth and progress go hand in hand with OSH challenges which includes huge unskilled workforce especially in unorganized sector which are very easily available, inadequate implementation of existing legislation, outsourcing, lack of reliable OSH data, shortage of trained OSH professionals, short life cycle of OSH, mindset about OSH at every level and so on.

I strongly believe that unless identified nothing can be prevented. Although HIRA and other risk identification techniques are available with almost all the organisations but still accidents are happening. Why? There are obviously only two reasons for that, one is our risk identification is not proper and the other is SOP is not followed at workplace. At basic level, reporting of near miss incident is very important for hazard identification but it is observed that this is not followed very meticulously.

Also, Health hazards is still underestimated as compared safety hazards across industries. This may be due to its delayed results. So, health hazards should be given equal importance.

But the positive side is, factors like increasing awareness are also ensuring making worker more aware about the hazard. Now a days more and more