The Hindu Business Line : ‘Industrial safety aspect not getting high priority’

Mumbai, June 11 The recent incidents of fire and explosions at Reliance Industries-managed IPCL petrochemical complex at Nagothane near Mumbai, Aditya Birla Nuvo fertiliser plant at Jagdishpur in Uttar Pradesh and BG India-operated Panna-Mukta offshore oil platform have once again raised the issue of industrial safety.

In the Reliance and BG India-run facilities, the accidents took place when a section of the facilities was under planned shutdown mode.

According to Dr Subodh Medhekar, noted industrial accident investigator, plants are most vulnerable when they are being restarted. Plants in the shutdown mode are in an ‘altered state’, when restarted the human intervention increases and the instruments running the plants take a back seat increasing the risk of human error, he said.

Dr Medhekar is a chemical engineer from IIT Delhi with a doctorate from University of California in safety and risk assessment.

He works as the principal engineer with California based Exponet, an engineering firm which investigates industrial accidents. It offers consultancy in engineering, defense technology development, health and environmental sciences.

India has safety standards and regulations but they are not rigorously implemented. The companies are not very strict about implementing the standards.

The industry is in a growth phase, as a result safety is not given high priority, Dr Medhekar said.

He added that implementing new safety standards costs a lot of money and Indian companies are not willing to shell out that kind of money. If the standards were made compulsory for all companies then they would be more willing to share the cost.

“In the US, if one life is lost or five people are injured in an industrial accident- then it is a very big deal. Companies pay huge insurance claims and damages. In India life is cheap,” he said.

Big Challenge

Commenting on the new safety standards which have been implemented since Bhopal gas tragedy, Dr Medhekar said in the last few years, all new Indian projects are at least incorporating safety standards at design level. Global standards such as hazard and operability study are being followed here. It is easy to look at a plant design and then incorporate safety systems, while building a plant. But implementing the same in existing plants is a big challenge, he said.

Dr Medhekar said that Indian chemical industry has understood that it needs to upgrade its safety standards but it will take time to adhere to global safety standard. “In all engineering systems, there is an inherent risk. You don’t stop driving a car because it is full of petrol.

“Risk is a combination of consequence and the likelihood of its happening, both needs to be mitigated. Our job should be to mitigate the likelihood of an incident by understanding how systems work, by protecting people and understating how systems can fail,” Dr Medhekar added.