The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Survey of occupational safety in industries

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Jul 05, 2007
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Survey of occupational safety in industries

M. Dinesh Varma

Sri Ramachandra University will conduct the exercise

CHENNAI: From a conventional factory hazard like fire to stress-related burnout and ergonomics in a wired workplace, a gamut of occupational safety and health issues across industries will be surveyed under a World Health Organisation-supported initiative.

Sri Ramachandra University, a WHO collaborating centre for research and training in occupational health, will take up the survey. It is expected to submit the framework of its plan to the WHO shortly.

“The dimensions of occupational safety have vastly changed; for instance, it is not enough for a manufacturing industry to keep its production premises clean; the safety mandate extends to maintaining a problem-free supply chain logistics,” says Kalpana Balakrishnan, head of the Department of Environmental Health Engineering, whose pioneering work in occupational health was instrumental in the university getting enlisted as a WHO partner. As a WHO collaborator, the university is expected to play a key role in implementing global occupational health strategies and creating safe working conditions.

Unorganised labour

The university is only the second such centre in India after the National Institute of Occupational Health, Ahmedabad, and the third in Southeast Asia after the Ministry of Public Health, Bangkok.

Though occupational safety standards will be evaluated across diverse workplace settings, the issues of unorganised labour in low-resource settings will get special focus. As the survey involves considerable onsite data gathering and a high degree of laboratory sophistication, the scientific forays will be limited to industries in south India. However, the exercise is aimed at engineering workplace solutions that can be replicated across the country. The collaborating centre has chalked out a plan that will involve expanding on its short-term, certificate, post-graduate and doctoral training programmes in occupational medicine, industrial hygiene and safety.

Conceived for the next four years, the plan will engage the university in multi-centric research projects that will profile various sectors by their occupational hazards.

It is also proposed to develop toolboxes to recognise and control exposures and provide technical and laboratory services for conducting exposure/risk assessments.

The collaborating centre will also network with the primary healthcare centres.

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