The government is contemplating constituting a sub-committee to inquire into working conditions of workers in various factories and also assess safety measures in workplace, especially in chemical and pharmaceutical companies, Minister for Labour, Employment, Training and Factories Pithani Satyanarayana said here on Wednesday.
He was delivering the inaugural address at a two-day workshop on ‘Chemical Safety and Disaster Mitigation in Pharma Industry Challenges and Opportunities’. The workshop was organised by Department of Factories and AP Pharma Industry.
According to the Minister, there are about 94 pharmaceutical industries in Visakhapatnam, Srikakulam and Vizianagaram districts and in the last three years there were about 217 accidents, with 53 occurring in Visakhapatnam district alone. He said committee will look into the quality and safety aspects of the industry and appropriate action will be taken. “Our idea is to reduce the accident rate and the fatalities,” he said. But at the same time he also said workers also need to follow the safety parameters.
“There have been many instances, where workers did not follow the basic safety measures such as wearing helmet or chemical suit. We have organised about 79 training sessions in the last year and we will continue to do so,” he said.
Director of Factories AP, G. Balakishore, said training of workforce should be an integral part of factory management and owners should invest on a regular basis on upgrading the safety parameters.
Corpus fund
Member Secretary of AP Pollution Control Board B.S.S. Prasadsaid all factories should build a corpus fund not only to rebuild the factory after an accident but it should also be used to pay compensation to workers who died or got injured in an accident.
He also urged the captains of the pharma units to improve the product mix to compete with China.
Mr. Madhusudana Rao from Divis Labs, Mr. Ananth from PharmaZell, Mr. Mohan Reddy of Hetero Drugs and Srihari Raju of Laurus Labs, spoke.
