Safety officers in any hazardous installation are appointed as specified in statutes, which say that factories where 1000 or more persons are employed, safety officer should be appointed. When the employee strength exceeds 2000, for every additional 1000 employees, one safety officer should be employed with 500 or more employees rounded to 1000. For major hazard installations, factory inspector can specify the number of safety officers irrespective of employee strength. Accordingly, the number of safety officers for various employee strength will be as follows:
Employee Strength No. of safety officers
Upto 1499 1
1500-2499 2
2500-3499 3
3500-4499 4
5499-6499 6
8499-9499 9 and so on.
In some states,
rules are framed as one safety officer for every 3000 employees is to be engaged.
As per
Maharashtra Safety Officers Rules, 1982; the no. of safety officers required is,
1000-2000 1
2001-5000 2
5001-10000 3
>10000 4
But, in reality safety professionals find it difficult to manage safety aspects with so many employees in a factory, particularly where the operations are varied and complex, and with a large number of departments. The duties of safety officers include carrying out / conducting,
- inspections if not every day but atleast once in a week
- issue of safe work permits
- permission for modifications, changes, erection/commissioning of new equipment/process, etc
- job hazard analysis
- safety meetings in every department
- apex safety committee meetings
- safety audits
- accident/incident investigation
- training
- safety awareness programmes
- safety seminars
- followup with departments for compliance with recommendations of various committees
- safety studies like HAZOP, ETA, FTA, HIRA, etc
- coordination with regulatory agencies
- preparation and filing reports as per statutory requirement
- updating and maintaining records
- PPE procurement
- office safety (of various departments)
- contractor safety
- and so on
In some factories, safety officer will be asked to manage fire safety and environment mangement also which will increase administrative work load.
The work load increases depending upon the number of departments / sections, safety officer has to deal with. For example, if the number of employees in a factory having 4-5 departments is 4000, the work load for 4 safety officers appointed as per statutory requirement will be somewhat less compared to the work when the number of department is, say 30-40 as the complexity will increase both in technical and administration. The problem multiplies for the safety officers when his colleague in the safety department proceeds on leave as they have to look after safety aspects temporarily during the leave period.
Technical difficulties are in the form of wide variety of operations and administration difficulties are in the form of dealing with a number of shop floor/section/department heads. As the number of employees and departments increase, the levels of officers will increase and accordingly safety officers have to deal from lower to top level in orderly fashion and this increases work load enormously. Shop floor person can say he is doing as per his next level supervisor instructions and if safety officer directly talks to top and next level person, he can say he is not aware or instruct the safety officer to talk to lower level in-charges.
Added to the above, is contractor workers and their safety. Normally, contractor workers are engaged for doing various petty jobs and sometimes for regular plant operations and civil works. The real difficulty is that they will be working at different places on same day or at different periods and therefore job hazard analysis for their jobs and ensuring their safety is a tough task.
Though there are safety coordinators in some factories who do production and safety coordination with the safety department, in practice these safety coordinators give importance to production activities and thus safety at workplace rests with the safety department.
Though, Factories Act and its Rules say the duty of safety officer is to advice and assist, in reality, safety officer ends up in doing the jobs and in some factories, he will be asked to eliminate the hazards also by engaging few contractor workers, i.e., he has to identify and eliminate. After sometime, this may lead to not doing the jobs even as per Factories Rules and cause a dangerous work place for employees.
In view of the above, I feel that the legislations regarding number of safety officers should be reviewed and revised taking into account of number of employees and number of departments as below:
- One safety officer for every 500 employees upto 2000 employees or every 5 departments and thereafter
- one safety officer for every 250 employees
With the above, the no. of safety officers can be as follows
Upto 500 1 2501-2750 7 4001-4250 13
501-1000 2 2751-3000 8 4251-4500 14
1001-1500 3 3001-3250 9 4501-4750 15
1501-2000 4 3251-3500 10 4751-5000 16 and so on.
2001-2250 5 3501-3750 11
2251-2500 6 3751-4000 12
The employee strength should be taken as maximum number (including contractor workers, casual workers, etc) supposed to work at any given time. To ensure safety, atleast one safety officer should be available in shifts other than general shift, including Sundays and holidays.
With the above, I feel that safety department can function effectively to ensure a safe work place.
