Chemical industry can help improve workplace safety by identifying and mitigating the potential risk hazards. Having the best possible safety management system for various potential hazards can help the chemical companies to design a safety plan and prevent accidents in the workplace. Experts believe that the role of leadership is vital in driving the organizational culture for implementing best safety management practices.

 “In the post pandemic scenario, we witnessed many incidents happening in the chemical industry, particularly the companies handling inflammable chemicals which are prone to explosion. We had different incidents happening in the western part of India and South India. As the industry debated and regulatory authorities looked at the root cause, it was found that there was lacuna in process safety management and change management which is critical for industry. Few incidents also happen due to mixing of non-compatible chemicals and work going on at the places where the inflammable material was stored, “said Mukul Agarwal, President-Manufacturing, Deepak Fertilizers and Petrochemicals Corporation Limited.

 “Therefore, it is important that key processes to be regulated such as pressure safety valves need to be inspected, besides process leakages and pressure ratings need to be adjusted. Key is to improve the process safety management practices being followed at the plants. At Deepak Fertilizers, we are following the safety rules very diligently as we handle many hazardous chemicals at our sites. That is the reason we have been able to safeguard our sites from negative incidents,” added Agarwal.

 Agarwal was speaking along with other leading industry stakeholders on various risks in business operations and HSE standards at the ‘NextGen Chemicals & Petrochemicals Summit 2022’ organized by Indian Chemical News on July 21, 2022. The panel discussion themed, “HSE: Risks, Challenges & Opportunities’ was moderated by Pravin Prashant, Editor, Indian Chemical News.

“Leadership plays a critical role not only in general management but also Health, Safety and Environment (HSE). However, I have found differential leadership treatment in the HSE profession. While India has made good progress in terms of HSE but as compared to other countries, there is still a long way to go as compared to what west has to offer. If the leadership is not conscious of the process safety management, the safety of products and processes will remain under clouds. Often it has been seen that whenever there is a cost cutting exercise, HSE is often used to reduce the expenses. But in the process it is important that HSE leadership is retained. It is important not to lose the information and knowledge generated over the period of time,” said Dr Atul Srivastava, Former Head of the Department & Vice President- HSE & LP Engineering, Reliance Industries Limited.

 Every organization should be able to provide a safe workplace for employees and have zero tolerance towards any lacuna. People are their key assets and it must not be just the regulatory fulfillment but a moral responsibility, believes Mukesh Kirar, Associate Vice President-HSE, SRF Limited.

 “Minimizing the risk is a secondary term. Rather a thorough risk assessment at all levels through various tools must be done to identify every risk in the risk register. Then there should be segregation of these organizational risks into categories such as low, medium and high. It should be followed by setting the highest standards for monitoring and validation of all the control measures. Each organization has a risk assessment register. Once they do the corrective measures or put up a mitigation plan to reduce the risk at a certain level, they put in place engineering control, administrative control etc. However, monitoring of these control measures is necessary. Most of the time, it fails due to the lack of awareness or right intentions. Education of the people about the risk is also important for the effective system,” added Kirar.

Developing a good organizational safety culture is important irrespective of whether the incident would happen or not, says Dr S P Garg, Advisor-HSE & Former Executive Director, GAIL (India) Limited.

“Besides having the safety management system and rest of the workforce in place, if you haven’t developed a good organizational culture and have a quick fix kind of culture, it can’t help in achieving the safety goals. We need to have interdependent safety culture in the organization wherein everybody is worried about safety. That kind of culture we have to imbibe in an organization. It is not an easy job or one-day affair but a journey to develop a good safety culture in an organization. Leadership plays a key role in this as it drives the culture and culture drives the behaviour. In GAIL we understood it quite late in 2013 when we realized that despite having the best safety management system in place, there were still small incidents happening here and there. We later deliberated and found that we were missing a behavioral intervention in the organization. You have to have a safety management system, safety policy, best SOPs, learn from peer organization and focused intervention on behaviour’ explains Dr Garg.

Hazard and risk at the workplace are hidden at organizational level and get built dangerously over the period of time, says Ramdas Bhaurao Jadhav, General Manager (HSE), Indian Oil Corporation Limited.

“We have to analyze such risks and build good HSE practices. It will help in building sustainability in everybody’s business. We have to understand the objectives and identify the hazards and risks in a simple way. Organizations have to implement it within the acceptable limits. They must train people on hazard and risk rather than operability. It will build their capability and reduce the risk at an acceptable level. Hazardous operability study can build disaster management plans that will ready us for any emergency. Firefighting equipment, self-protection equipment. Post any incident, response and recovery within crisis management is another aspect. Minimize, monitor and control are a part of risk assessment. Risks can result in death, damage to environment, property and personnel if not mitigated,” added Jadhav.

“While the commitment from top leadership is a must, the agility from middle leadership and shop-floor people is also required. When there is a combination of leadership from top to bottom, we can create the culture. If the crop protection chemical is having a red triangle, it means highest toxicity in low dosage. The hierarchy says that is elimination, substitution, and engineering control. The whole world thinks about removing handling hazards. So R& D is going to change this scenario. Instead of a red triangle on crop protection chemicals, R& D can help in developing low toxic molecules. In this way, there is elimination of high toxic molecules and instead there are molecules that have less toxicity towards humans, animals and water bodies,” said Manoj Patel, GM-Quality & HSE, Adama India.

 As per Vedprakash Singh, Managing Director, Kenzo Creative, most of the risks are man-made and to control these we need an organizational culture. 

“It starts from top leadership which is supposed to disseminate further and percolate down. In occupational safety, you have few injuries and damage to property at small levels. In process safety, we can’t afford a single mistake as it is the loss of containment. Inherent Safety Design is also a part of safety culture and leadership. For example, if a company has to build a new plant and the risks go beyond safety limits, leadership must decide for changes in the technology before any go ahead. Changing the design at the concept stage can help as it can’t be done at the operational stage. Safety culture transformation can happen but has to be driven by leadership,” commented Singh.

The NextGen Chemicals & Petrochemicals Summit 2022 was supported by the leading names of the industry. The platinum partner was Elliot Group. Regulatory Knowledge Partner was GPC. Gold partners of the event included Ingenero, Premier Tech, Carbanio and Deepak Nitrite. Among the associate partners were PIP and Huntsman. The industry partners of the event included AMAI, Croplife India, and ACFI.