Electrocutions - A Story that repeats

Of late, there were many news paper reports almost on every alternate day about the death of the persons and sometimes animals (mostly) and injuries due to contact of the living being with some cable or wire carrying electricity. The job in hand at the time of the incident involving victim were mostly, repair of a domestic water pump in the sump / repair of connections on the street light pole / touching an electric street light pole / moving near loosely hanging cables or wire / drawing electricity by illegal connection by a greedy person / etc.

For genuine repairs, it is the minimum requirement to cut off power supply and also ensure line clearance from respective agenices and display CAUTION BOARD for not switching ON power supply. It is best to use locking arrangement and keep the key with the person carrying out the work. A supervisor is a must and hazards in the job should be assessed and safety measures for identified hazards should be in place before start of work. This is applicable for jobs executed by agencies.

For repair works at home, it is common practice for the resident to do him self and get shock. All this to save few rupees at the cost of risking life and thus endangering the livelihood of his dependents also. It is best to call experts in the field for repairs even if it appears a small and known job.

Reports say most of the time line clearance is not obtained and the person mostly engaged on the job will be a casual worker. He may be skilled in his work but the responsibility of ensuring isolation of power supply lies with the department person and as it appears from so many deaths, this supervisor simply washes off his responsibility by allocating the job and it is doubtful whether the job is supervised even for some time.

When we learn from these costly deaths, not in terms of money, but that of making the dependents of the deceased to struggle for their livelihood apart from mental agony and pain of losing their dear ones.

Enforcing strict penalties by settingup special fast track courts only to handle the cases of violations of industry related legislations like Factores Act, Environment Protection Act, Indian Electricty Act, Explosives Act, etc and Rules framed under these Acts will bring a sense of responsibility when responsible persons become aware of punishments. It is mostly the lack of application of stick that is making persons irresponsible and fail to ensure safety in their areas of control.

Though we say stick is useful only to some extent, the incidents recurring at regular frequency shows that still we have not yet developed out of this DANDOPAYAM.