The law requires risk information about major accident hazards to be communicated to public, but this has rarely been done for fear that it will raise 'needless' questions. It is time to realise that more public information will only help reduce risk, not increase it. Besides, if a patient, has the right to know the ailment he/she has, a potential patient has the right to know the environmental and workplace risks she/he is being exposed to and the remedial steps required.The first step then is to put all environment and safety documents .

1. 1
Workplace injury: Is there a solution for the colossal loss?
By.Dr.Mahboob ali khan Phd
MORE INDIANS die because of three types of injuries -workplace
fatal and non-fatal physical injuries due to accidents, occupational
diseases due to toxic exposures at the workplace and health effects
caused by environmental exposures - than due to all other manner of
other man-made violence - be they on India's borders, in communal and
political violence, in crimes, and so on. Yet, this problem has gone un-
noticed and un-addressed as workplace injuries are grossly under-
reported and environmental injuries remain un-estimated. Of the three
types of injuries, published statistics, for what they are worth, are the
best for workplace accidents. A recent issue of the Ministry of Labour's
(MoL) Indian Labour Statistics reports an average annual incidence of
1,400 fatal and one lakh non-fatal accidents in non- domestic
workplaces.
The same document also provides fatal and non-fatal injury rates for
the workforce for which accidents are reported. Based on these rates,
fatal accidents can be estimated to range between 50,000 and 75,000
and non-fatal accidents 5 to 7.5 million per year for the entire
workforce in India. If mortalities due to all causes were considered for
Indian workers in the age group 15-60 years, workplace fatalities
contribute premature deaths in this population to the extent of 5 per
cent.
Published statistics for occupational diseases are more meagre and
difficult to believe than those for workplace accidents. Past issues of
MoL's Indian Labour Year Book report an average annual incidence of
new occupational disease cases of about 90 during the Seventies and
early Eighties. Jawaharlal Nehru University Professor Imrana Qadeer
disputes these figures. She estimated that the number of new cases in
just three industries (asbestos, cotton textiles and lead) to be in the
region of 40,000 per annum. Interestingly, recent MoL's publications
have stopped reporting the incidence of occupational diseases
altogether. The large difference between reported and estimated figures

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for workplace injuries (accidents and exposures) are because injury
statistics are available only for factory workers, who form 3 per cent of
the Indian workforce; statistics for all States are usually not compiled;
and under-reporting of injuries is high.
Statistics or estimates of health effects due to environmental exposures
are virtually non-existent in India. A rare study found that there was
approximately 15 per cent excess illness in highly polluted areas of
Mumbai in the late-Seventies. The Central Pollution Control Board's
latest release of air quality data indicates that 68 out of 70 of India's
major urban areas, accounting for 25 per cent of India's population, are
at the same or over pollution level classified by the Kamat study as
high. That translates to 37.5 million air pollution-related excess illness
episodes per year. Though this figure sounds startlingly high, a recent
report in Down to Earth report corroborates it. Based on a World Bank
(WB) document, the report updates WB estimates of the annual disease
burden due to suspended particulate matter (SPM) in air at 25 million
excess illnesses and 52,000 premature deaths in 36 Indian cities for
1995.
Estimates of disease burden for water, soil, noise and other air
pollutants are not available. The statement made by Mr. P. V. Thacker,
a former Maharashtra Chief Factories Inspector, that ``Non-detection
for want of competent examination is being interpreted as non-
existence of occupational disease in interested quarters'' rings as true
today as it did three decades back when it was made, not just for
occupational diseases but for all environmental and workplace injuries.
If the burden of occupational diseases is considered to be at least as
much as that of workplace accidents, the estimated annual burden of
disease due to environmental (SPM only) and workplace injuries would
be at the very minimum of the order 2 lakh premature deaths and 50
million excesses illnesses. If other air pollutants were considered, the
number of premature deaths may well be of the order of more than 3
lakhs annually; which is still well below the 10 lakh per annum estimate
made recently by the environmentalist, Mr. Anil Agarwal, for
environmental exposures alone.Clearly, the absence of reliable
statistics and epidemiological studies (the study of disease prevalence

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and causation) has reduced estimating environment and workplace
injury into intelligent guesswork.
Who pays the cost?
Workplace and environment hazards are flipsides of the same coin.
Both are caused by dirty and unsafe technologies and work methods.
The colossal injury they cause can be reduced by investing in control
systems to make industry cleaner and safer, and R&D to design better
products. While an estimate of what this amount may be does not exist,
a recent Administrative Staff College of India study provides clues for
what it may cost for one sector - Rs. 25,000 crores to abate
environmental pollution for new thermal power capacity to come up in
Andhra Pradesh over the next 15 years. The cleanup cost for Indian
industry will be many hundred times more.
In the absence of a strong push to invest in environment and safety
systems, the short-run 'least-cost' option for industry and government
is to externalise costs onto people which ultimately take the form of ill
health and premature deaths. The estimated annual monetary loss due
to environmental SPM-exposure related fatalities and illnesses,
according to the DTE report, was Rs. 4,500 crores (the cost of a 2,000
MW power plant) for 36 cities. If the same costing norms are applied
for workplace and other environmental health effects, the annual
monetary loss would be of the order of Rs. 30,000 crores per annum,
that is, one-tenth the 2000-01 Union Government's budget.
Natural justice seeks compensation for any form of injury. The law of
torts has been used effectively in north nations to obtain large
settlements for workplace and environmental injury. W R Grace, a U.S.
company, recently paid an average settlement of a million dollar to each
of eight leukamia patients because it had dumped trichloroethylene into
drinking water of Woburn, a small town near Boston. Each of the
10,000 asbestosis-related deaths reported annually in the U.S. is also
settled for similar amounts.
In India, settlements for environmental injury have virtually never
occurred, and for workplace injury are woefully inadequate. In the
early-Nineties, the average settlement for workplace fatal and non-fatal

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injuries made by the Workmens' Compensation Commissioner was Rs.
7.50 crores per year, that is, 0.025 per cent of the estimated monetary
loss caused by workplace and environmental injury. Each workplace
fatal injury was settled for an average amount of Rs. 50,000, each
serious injury for Rs. 20,000 and each temporary disabling injury for
Rs. 1,500.
Three devices for immediate relief
The high levels of premature death and excess illness caused by
polluted environments and unsafe workplaces, which have persisted for
the last two decades, can only mean that regulations governing them
and regulators have completely failed the Indian people. If India aspires
to become a global economic player on gain maximisation side, it
cannot afford to have such high attrition levels and must pay attention
to risk minimisation. Drastic measures are now required to bring down
injury rates. And though no quick-fix solutions exist, three devices will
help mitigate it.
First is the use of the economic carrot and stick method. If injury
settlements become more expensive than investment in control
systems, dirty and unsafe technologies and products will be retired in
favour of cleaner and safer ones. This happened in the north nations in
the last three decades. For example, compensation for asbestos-related
injuries, which run into hundreds of thousands of dollars per case,
forced Johns Manville, the largest asbestos conglomerate in the U.S.
till the Eighties, to roll down its shutters. This story will repeat itself in
India, provided there is the political will to allow it to happen.
While the north nations used tort law to obtain large compensation
amounts for human injury, clogged courts and a creaky bureaucracy in
India cannot provide justice quickly. It took a wheezy and ailing Mr.
Rajagopolan, an ex-employee of Hindustan Ferodo, a lot of courage
and perseverance to win the first asbestosis compensation settlement in
India. Fifteen years of litigation where he repeatedly appealed against
being diagnosed as suffering from bronchitis and bronchial asthma left
him Rs. 21,000 richer a decade ago, but also exhausted. If he was
handicapped in doing lone battle, class action has fared no better.

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Monetary disbisbursements are still now being made, even 11 years
after the court-assisted settlement for the Bhopal gas tragedy victims.
A good start to increase settlement amounts and reduce payout time is
by increasing the relief amounts payable to off-site industrial accident
victims under the Public Liability Insurance (PLI) Act by 150 times
that now specified under the Act, and making these amounts a part of
the total compensation, that may be part of a court decree or a mutual
settlement. Lengthy adjudication is avoided as strict liability applies to
cases that come under the PLI Act and disbursement of relief amount
is quick as it is decreed by the district collector. Relief amounts for a
fatal accident or permanent disablement will increase from Rs. 25,000
to Rs. 37.50 lakhs. Even at this level, it works to less than one tenth the
average amount received by similar cases in north nations. An
automatic increase of 5 per cent per annum in the relief amounts should
be allowed for 50 years.
This move will push up insurance premiums and push out small units
from handling hazardous substances, which are least interested in
investing in control systems. It will also push up injury settlements not
covered by the act, whether by statute or by court order. A
complementary devise is to link insurance premiums to risk assessment
and provide tax breaks for facilities which can publicly demonstrate a
reduction in the risk they pose. Insurance companies will then force the
industry to do better risk analysis studies, including human and material
resource capability assessment. Higher injury settlements will have
another beneficial fallout for Indian industry. Risk reduction through
technology and product upgrades, which implies loss prevention, will
make Indian industry more competitive in global markets.
Second, if the system has failed them, people must offer non- violent
satyagraha, as they did a 100 years ago for independence, to reclaim
good health - the right to participate in the management of their work,
leisure and rest environments. After all, risk bearers have the biggest
stake in reducing risk, and therefore the maximum potential motivation
to do it.
It will take time and effort to re-orient the existing top-down
environment and safety management system. But a beginning can be

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made in gradually increasing public participation in environmental
management and labour participation in safety management, example,
by making it mandatory to consider comments from public and labour
while doing all manner of environmental and safety studies, by by
making it mandatory to report environment and safety management
practices in a firm's annual report.
Third, one of the prime requisites for people's participation in
environmental and safety management is information, which today is
not available in the public domain. The law requires risk information
about major accident hazards to be communicated to public, but this
has rarely been done for fear that it will raise 'needless' questions. It is
time to realise that more public information will only help reduce risk,
not increase it. Besides, if a patient, has the right to know the ailment
he/she has, a potential patient has the right to know the environmental
and workplace risks she/he is being exposed to and the remedial steps
required.The first step then is to put all environment and safety
documents with government agencies into public domain, including
studies done for site clearance including costing of externalities, plant
audits, consent conditions for operating facilities, violations of consent
conditions and citations, monitoring data and studies conducted by
government agencies, material safety data sheets, government policy
statements, government schemes and plans, international agreements
signed by India, background information for setting standards, toxic
import, storage and release inventories and the like. The only exception
to this being documents which compromise the nation's security or a
person's rights under patent laws.
Right to information will work only when accompanied by a search
engine which guides a searcher quickly to the information she/he
wants. The design of computerised and non-computerised search
engines is beyond the scope of this article, but it is worth mentioning
that the Andhra Pradesh Pollution Control Board has taken a step in the
right direction by asking industrial units to publicise on boards at its
main entrance information regarding its consent conditions, the latest
environmental monitoring data and hazardous storages and the area that
will be affected if a worst case accident happens.