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Chennai: Some 16 people were burnt alive due
to a huge explosion at Visakhapatnam Steel Plant’s melting shop,
drawing the nation’s attention to abysmal safety standards at all
the steel factories in the country.
Visakhapatnam Steel Plant has been conferred Navratna status on 17
November 2010. The company focuses on producing value-added steel,
with 214,000 tonnes produced in August 2010, out of 252,000 tonnes
total of salable steel produced.
In its blast furnace-III that was erected as part of a plan to
expand the plant capacity to 6.3 million tones where the explosion
took place when the officials were conducting a trial run of the
recently commissioned oxygen plant.
This is the second accident at the plant in a span of one month.
On May 1, two people had died in a furnace blast. In another fire
mishap, on May 22, a conveyor belt carrying raw material to a new
blast furnace completely melted, stalling the production and
causing property loss of about Rs.1 crore.
The machinery in the newly-built plant where the latest mishap
occurred was erected by a German company, that didn't provide
expertise or any proper instructions to the steel plant and is
blamed for such industrial mishap.
However, the Employees' Union blamed negligence on the part of the
management for frequent accidents in the plant. Trade union
leaders allege that maintenance work in the plant had been
neglected for more than a year and there was no supervision of
safety or quality in the expansion work.
The recent tragedy was the worst ever accident in a steel plant in
India. In it’s recently released green rating of the Indian steel
sector, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) had drawn the
attention of Vizag Steel to its poor safety record.
The latest accident at Vizag Steel is symptomatic of the overall
safety and health situation in the Indian steel industry, says a
CSE official.
In fact, the CSE’s Green Rating Project (GRP) survey has revealed
that over 144 people died in the period 2007-2010 in 17 of the 21
steel plants which the survey studied.
Poor occupational safety management system was found as a clear
area of concern in all the steel plants of the country.
The CSE-GRP study during the three-year period found that more
than 50 people die every year in major steel plants of the
country. It also found that the steel industry of India has one of
the worst safety performances in the world.
Iron and steel plants involve several complex processes with
hazardous working conditions that require skilled understanding of
the safety hazards.
The existing safety monitoring and coordinating structures lack
expertise or enforcement capacity to regulate safety measures in
steel plants.
It was also clearly found that OHSAS 18001 certification does not
have any correlation with the safety records of these plants. This
is why existing institutional structures have completely failed to
reduce accident rates in the sector.
As concluded in the GRP study and given the latest unfortunate
incident at Vizag Steel, it is again being recommended that a
specialist regulatory body needs to be put in place to supervise,
enforce, train, enhance disclosure and improve the overall safety
performance of the steel plants in India..
There is also a need for strengthening of the existing laws of the
1948 Factories Act under which steel industry safety is being
currently regulated.
The institutional mechanism and laws of the country are severely
constrained to manage, supervise safety and health performance of
the steel sector.
Before any other inferno grips a steel factory in India, it is
high time to have a foolhardy mechanism in place in such factories
to avoid such industrial mishaps happening again.
Syed Ali Mujtaba is a journalist based in Chennai. He can be
contacted at syedalimujtaba@yahoo.com
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