OUR SAFETY.
OUR RESPONSIBILITY.

January is observed as ‘Safety Month’ at L&T Construction and it was no different this year as ‘Safety Month 2020’ was inaugurated at the HQ Manapakkam campus by Mr. S N Subrahmanyan, CEO & Managing Director, L&T, in the presence of the senior leadership of L&T Construction and some 2000 employees on the morning of January 4th 2020.

“Safety is all about being enlightened and empowered,” declared SNS in his keynote address, stressing the importance of training and empowering workmen who were both the last as well as the most important link in our delivery chain. “A small mistake by a workman can result in a serious incident endangering the lives of many and hence it is extremely important to sensitize our workmen to proper EHS methods to ensure that they act and remain safe at sites.” Acknowledging the fact that our workforce is largely unskilled and migratory in nature, he said, “While, on one hand, we need to continuously train and re-train our workmen, on the other, we must think differently to address this issue: perhaps by getting larger gangs who will remain together longer with us and by improving their habitations as well.”

The rising number of fatalities has been a growing concern for our senior management and SNS minced no words when addressing it. “It is getting increasingly difficult to explain some of these incidents at the apex level,” he lamented. “What’s disturbing is that the same kind of mistakes are being repeated. Time has come and the management may be forced to take sterner steps going forward if this trend continues. It is great that we have introduced so many new EHS initiatives, new systems, processes and digital solutions to improve our safety, but these,” emphasized SNS, “are only worth if we are able reduce the number of fatalities and incidents at site.”

The event, aptly themed ‘Our Safety. Our responsibility.’, to drive the thought that safety was a shared responsibility and that it was imperative to ‘be safe’ for all to ‘remain safe’, began with Mr. S Kanappan, Chief Executive, L&T GeoStructure leading everyone by administering the Safety Pledge, after which Mr. M V Satish, Whole Time Director & Senior Executive Vice President, Buildings, Minerals & Metals, took the podium to deliver this welcome address. “We received a total of 11 Sword of Honor awards,” he began on a positive note quickly adding that 10 of them had been won by B&F to loud applause. “We have also won 62 RoSPA Awards – 22 by PT&D and 11 each by WET & B&F ICs,” he shared, but immediately sobered by sharing the chilling details about the quantum increase in the number of fatalities in 2019 compared to the previous year. “Safety works when people work together. We had been talking about bringing a positive culture to the workplace to take our EHS management practices to meet global best practices. But culture can only be changed when we change our way of working and that too consistently over a longer period. There is no short cut to this!”

MVS pointed out that one of the basic EHS problems faced at site was the “momentary unsafe behavior of people leading to accidents,” acts that were difficult to monitor and control. “We are therefore mpowering our workmen to intervene when they observe unsafe behaviors of fellow workmen, speak to them and convince them to correct their ways. We have requested all our project managers to put up signboards at all conspicuous places at sites to authorize workmen to “stop work”, if they feel that the workplace is unsafe. To start with, we introduced this practice at the sites that were nominated for the five-star audit of the British Safety Council but have now started to implement it across all our project sites,” he elaborated.

An important aspect raised by SNS was about maintaining safety at the campus which was addressed by Mr. K P Ravinath, Head — Environment Health & Safety (EHS), L&T Geo Structure IC, when sharing the list of activities that have been planned during the Safety Month. “We shall form an action committee to conduct a comprehensive risk assessment for all the critical activities at HQ including traffic control, defensive driving initiatives and fire-fighting training for the canteen and security staff and take corrective steps,” he promised before referring to the other EHS activities that includes a blood donation camp, an eye check-up camp and a beach cleaning exercise.

The short and focused event that was ably compered by Vivek Rai, Senior Engineer (Civil), WET IC, ended with Mr.S.L.Mahajan,VP & Head,Sub-stationBU,PT&D ICaccording the vote of thanks.

We do hope that everyone who attended the event will take cognizance of what our senior management had to share on safety, remain ever alert to following safety practices because at end of the day, our safety is our responsibility.

The L&T Construction EHS team with SNS