LA5 HEALTH & SAFETY MONITORING AND COMMUNICATION

Factory Act 1948 & Bihar Factory Rules 1950 guidelines form the basis for recording and notification of occupational accidents and diseases in the organization. Any occupational accident is reported immediately to safety control room manned round the clock through phone. Any injury is reported to nearby first aid station. There are two First Aid stations inside Works, equipped with well-maintained ambulance with trained staff, to take care of any emergency situations. First information on department, location, nature, time of accident, person involved and damage occurred is sent to Safety Department in the prescribed format. This reporting also includes minor incident, dangerous occurrences and near miss cases. Reportable accidents (where injured does not return to work for 48 hours) are reported to Inspector of Factories.

In case of any fatal accident, the information in writing is sent to Chairman, General Safety Committee, Inspector of Factories and local government officials on the day of such incident. The jobs are stopped till it is cleared by Inspector of Factories after site verification. Within 48 hours of accident, enquiry committee is constituted to investigate into the root cause/s of accident. The recommendation/s are discussed in General Safety Committee and are circulated to all Departmental Heads/Chiefs to take necessary preventive actions to prevent such occurrences.

This year an online system, called SIS (Safety Improvement System), has been implemented to log and set target date for improving the unsafe condition observed at site. Observations can be assigned 3 priority values based on severity of consequence of an existing unsafe situation and probability of occurrence of an accident. Safety Officer logs his observation on a particular section in a department, which results in an email to Unit Leader of Section and Head of Section notifying them of observation. Unit Leader after corrective action triggers a “Closed by Department”, email to Safety Officer who verifies the status closes it or rejects the same. In the later case the above cycle is followed again. During the reporting period a total number of 25001 observations were logged by Safety Officers and 24296 closed by the concerning departments through above mentioned system as against 15993 and 13160 respectively during 02-03. Any unattended issues are escalated on-line to top management for their intervention.

LA6 JOINT HEALTH & SAFETY COMMITTEE INVOLVING MANAGEMENT AND WORKER REPRESENTATIVES

Senior Management constitutes Apex Council on safety in consultation with employee’s Union. This council usually consists of 10 members, 6 from management and 4 from employee union and is headed by Managing Director of the company. The complete structure of Joint Committees for Safety, Health, Environment and other Welfare activities is as follows;
    

The workforce formally elects the representatives nominated by Unions and they represent the views of entire workforce.