Management of occupational safety and health (OSH) regulation with particular reference to Indian mining sector

Abstract

Regulation is one of the defining features of modern society. The aim of Occupational Safety and Health (OSH)/ Safety and Health Regulation, in particular, is to keep the genie of technology in the bottle whilst still exploiting its power for creation of wealth and change. It is a difficult compromise and Regulators often have a thankless task. If all goes well, regulators are painted as repressive and anti technological. However, if disaster strikes, the media immediately focuses on them for lax enforcement and cosy relations with the regulated. From the earliest written records on human occupation, mining has been characterized as a dangerous trade with a high probability of injury, illness, or worse (Agricola 1556). This characterization developed over thousands of years during which life was fragile for those who removed and processed ore. Regrettably, mining accidents were often viewed as one of the tragic costs of extracting the materials necessary for the development of modern life. In such work environment the role of safety and health at workplace hardly needs any emphasis .Over the last century, engineering and technological developments together with improved safety and health regulation and management practices have contributed a great deal to the improvements in mine safety and health across the globe. In India too, there have been noticeable improvement in injury performance in this sector; yet, the statistics show an asymptotic trend particularly over the last two decades. Another perturbing fact in this connection is the mine disasters which continue to haunt us even today, killing and maiming a large number of work persons and creating social distress. Noticeably, such trend has been observed even after growing regulatory efforts from government side and even nationalizing the Coal Sector in the country(1973), with one of the major aim being improvement of safety and health conditions at work in this sector. All such symptoms logically point towards a need to review the existing government centric and compliance oriented regulatory policy (mainly focused on the technical and operational aspects) in the country in order to make it more effective in the management of safety and health at workplace. The regulatory policy, in place, is likely to face further challenge in the near future due to growing size, spread and complexity of the operations in this sector, liberalization and thus bringing in heterogeneous work culture in this sector and shrinking government resources for effective OSH surveillance and regulatory enforcement. Pertinently, these makes the issue interesting to a policy researcher for probing into the underlying relationship between the policy and its effect so far and design a suitable strategic framework for effective regulation in this important public policy area. Generally, regulation as a policy tool is often in disfavour in the industry because the regulation cost is viewed as borne by regulated industries while most benefits go to others (an equity issue). Economists often criticize regulation as an inefficient substitution of centralized decision making for the alleged rationality of the market (an efficiency issue). However, the harshest critics of regulation apparently recognize that relying on market and devising better incentives cannot solve every public problem and sometime government has a valid reason to use stick rather than carrot. This has been particularly apparent after every major failure/ disaster. In this research based study, an effort has been made to evaluate the effectiveness of the existing regulatory strategy vis-a-vis the challenges before it followed by exploration of other policy options designed and experimented elsewhere and finally formulate a strategic framework for management of occupational safety and health regulation with a view to make it more acceptable and effective in both organized and unorganized industries in this important sector of the national economy. In view of the issue being directly connected with public safety at large, it would be an ethical responsibility on the part of the system of governance to proactively become the change-agent for implementing the new strategic framework. However, management of such change is very important in this context. The impact on OSH of internal changes (viz; new working procedures, competence development, organizational structures etc. within the industry) and of external changes (viz; amendment of national law, development of new OSH management knowledge and OSH surveillance systems etc. within the regulators) arising out of the new framework need to be evaluated and appropriate preventive steps taken prior to introduction of the new regulatory framework. While formulating the framework, although, focus has been made on the experiences in the Indian mining/ mineral sector, yet, the concepts developed can be equally applicable in a generic sense to management of OSH regulation in other sectors, as well