Health & Safety

Ensuring +VE Health & Safety Outcomes

A core strategic priority for Hindustan Zinc, safety is a key focus area and consideration in all our actions and decisions. Safety, for us, is non-negotiable and an integral part of our business. We care dedicatedly for the Safety of our people, business associates and communities. To fulfill our commitment of Zero Harm, we have embarked on a concerted and holistic effort to improve safety and health across all our units, and within the communities in which we operate.

VISION

Achieving “Zero Harm” to people with the belief that all workplace injuries are preventable

Focused Approach
  • Recognizing occupational safety as a core value, and driving responsibility towards Safety, Health & Environment (SHE) to protect the people we work with and the society at large
  • Taking initiatives towards ensuring the utmost safety of our employees and the environment they work in. Our Safety Excellence Journey is a significant initiative on this front
  • Governing safety through the Apex Body, which is the Corporate Safety Council, chaired by the CEO and involving various leaders from all verticals. Building the three safety pillars: safety culture transformation, capacity building and process safety management
Strategic Priorities
  • Achieve zero fatality
  • Achieve zero occupational illness cases
  • Improve occupational health and hygiene
  • Effective high potential risk management
  • Critical review and audit of safety standard implementation

In line with our commitment to ensure Zero harm to our employees, our leadership had taken on the prime responsibility of providing safe workplace to all employees entering our premises.

In the reporting year, based on the analysis of past incidents, several focused drives like Monthly theme celebration, Hand tool safety, Industrial hygiene, Sump and pit audit, Housekeeping etc., were conducted throughout the year. The drives were aimed at making the employees more aware about the past incidents, and the preventive measures that resulted in achieving Zero fatality for the year. There is, notably, a significant reduction in LTIs from 86 last year to 51 this year, while our lost time injury rate reduced from 1.38 last year to 0.97 this year.

Though the injury trend at Hindustan Zinc is on the rise for the past two years, mainly on account of more focus on incident reporting, categorization and incident investigation, our leadership has been constructive in taking this as a positive safety cultural shift. This has resulted in more specific efforts towards reducing the incidents and making our workplace incident-free.

Performance & Commitment

Target FY2022

ZERO

Fatality at work site

20%

Year over year reduction in Lost Time Injury frequency rate


Target FY2025

ZERO

Fatality at work site

50%

Reduction from FY2020 in Lost Time Injury frequency rate

Safety Governance Structure

We have always promoted safety as one of the most integral cogs of our value system and have adopted best-in-class measures for ensuring the safety of our employees. Initiated in 2013, our Safety Excellence Journey ‘Aarohan’ is an initiative driven by the desire to protect the people we work with. We are collaborating with DuPont Sustainable Solutions, which is known worldwide for its excellent safety systems, on this front.

Our Corporate Safety Council provides overall direction to the organization’s Safety Management System. The Corporate Safety Council is chaired by the CEO, with the Chief HSE Officer acting as secretary and senior leaders being its members. It is assisted by eight corporate sub-committees and nine zone apex committees to carry out its primary objective of policy development, resource deployment and laying out the strategic safety roadmap for the organization. The role of safety sub-committees is to establish various safety systems, standards, rules, procedures, and help the organization achieve its zero-harm goal seamlessly.

Introduction of Safety Innovation Committee

To bring more focus on safety innovation and reduce the risk of LTI/MTI/HIPO through technology and innovations, we added the 8th Safety Subcommittee – Safety Innovation Committee to our safety governance structure. This committee will work for:

Identifying innovative engineering solutions for High Risk activities.

Eliminate/Minimize manual activities in material handling.

Improve awareness on safety culture through Innovative ways.

Digitalization of safety system.

Some of the Initiatives taken during the Year
1. India’s First Underground Ambulance & First Aid Station Rampura Agucha Mine

During the year, Rampura Agucha Mine developed India’s first underground First Aid Room & Underground Ambulance Station. This occupational health & medical facility has been established in the underground mine at a depth of 600 meters from surface.

This First Aid Room is air conditioned for cool environment, and is equipped with all the necessary medical & rescue equipment, such as AED (Automatic External Defibrillators), ECG machine, Oxygen cylinders, blood pressure monitor, saline facility, with a stretcher bed for resting. The mine will also use this facility for dealing with any emergency situation like fire or flooding. The management has provided trained rescue persons at this underground center in every shift, with advanced ambulance having oxygen facilities and AEDs for providing CPR.

2. Digitalization of Safety Standards

With Digitalization clearly the need of the hour, we have driven digitalization across all fields at Hindustan Zinc, be it operations, maintenance or projects, and across all functions. We are working on the development of a digital platform to capture maximum leading indicators and all the lagging indicators, with the objective of ensuring transparency and improving the analytics of data being reported by our employees. Our digital platform has helped us in capturing safety-related observations for intelligent analysis, tracing closure, reduction of manual data capturing, and reduction of error due to human intervention & limitations. To capture more leading indicators, access to all safety-related software were given to all employees of the organization, including contractor workforce, so that anyone who sees any unsafe act or condition or near miss can report the same immediately. All safety software is very user-friendly and can be easily accessed through our web portal or App. All safety-related software is placed on a single Cloud-based platform for better interaction, integration and availability. Daily auto generated reports helps IBUs identify safety concern areas, and ensure proactive action plans for pointed outcomes.

The Hindustan Zinc M-library facilitates availability of all safety-related documents, like Safety standards, Training modules, Safety videos, Policies etc., for all employees at a single click. The Digital Training Passport helps in tracking the individual induction, refresher and other safety-related training details, along with next due date of training. Our incentives and penalties framework is also digitalized through Hazard Reporting Software. We also have an online E-learning module, with monthly online tests and assessments also conducted through digital platforms only. As our data is Cloud-based, it is possible for us do smart analytics using artificial intelligence, which in turn helps us to identify high risks and take proactive measures, thus helping us in our injury reduction plan and achieve zero harm. We have recently developed a Digital module on Scaffolding safety. We are also equipped with software like Safety interaction-behavior change tool, Incident management, Contractor Safety management, Process Safety management, Hazard Reporting Tool, M-learning, Management of Change, M-Quiz, One Day Safety Officer & Night Duty Officer, 5S software, etc.

3. Project RuBaRu

Initiated in FY 2019-20, the project aims to establish a safe and productive environment at our job sites by improving the execution capability of our business partners. The project focuses on four key areas, namely:

  • Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) commitment for safe operations and strengthening our safety culture
  • Skill enhancement for continuous performance improvement
  • Management-in-Place to ensure that our business partners have the right organization structure, complete with right talent in right positions
  • Asset optimization to maximize all aspects of our critical equipment

We started this program with select business partners at Rajpura Dariba, in partnership with “Accenture Strategy and Consulting” in FY 2019-20. In FY 2020-21, the program was extended to cover 24 key business partners across key locations.

Our approach to improvement on the four identified areas entails a rigorous capability assessment of our 4,800+ business partners’ workforce by technically trained supervisors. Following the assessment, a tailored training program is implemented to bridge identified skill gaps. We have partnered with renowned training experts to upskill our business partner workforce.

The training program includes a holistic training methodology, combining aspects of execution capabilities and behavioral skills through on job trainings, pre & post training assessments, and select classroom sessions to ensure a comprehensive, practical learning experience. The iSkill tool has been deployed digitally to track business partner manpower skill improvement.

HSE initiatives saw Business Partners & Hindustan Zinc Leadership conduct on-site Gemba Walk and engage directly with on-ground technical staff during FY 2020-21. More than 170+ Gemba walks have been completed across business partners during the year with Improvement initiatives identified and addressed diligently by business partners. The HSE CAPA portal has been deployed to track business partner improvement initiatives.

We also strengthened the ‘Management in Place’ program across Business Partner Organization by adding various new roles and strengthening existing roles by appointing competent candidates with respect to skill, qualification and experience. Simultaneously, an online dashboard has been deployed to track and review performance across key leading & lagging metrics of Preventive Maintenance, Condition Based Maintenance and Productivity against leading targets.

Overall, during the year, 0.65 mn man-hours of safety trainings were imparted to employees and contract employees.

4. Visible Felt Leadership

Visible Felt Leadership is the management’s total actions that lead people at all levels, to understand and “feel” their leaders’ high standards, and accept their strong commitment to safety as being genuine, caring and respectful. Felt leadership depends on senior leaders regularly interacting and engaging with employees by means of observations, wideranging conversations about processes and safety, and addressing everyday challenges of the business. It is important for leaders to regularly participate in leading safety activities that are easily observable to promote injury prevention.

Felt leaders successfully engage with their people by being purposely visible in the workplace and being relentless about spending time with employees. Good felt leaders make a positive impression on those they come in contact with, and maintain a strong self-safety focus at all times, while demonstrating their personal commitment to incident-free workplaces.

During the year, we launched the VFL (Visible Felt Leadership) scorecard for top leaders of the Company with the objective of measuring and improving the participation of our leaders in ensuring a safe working culture in the organization. Visible felt leadership score card is applicable to all the senior leadership, including the CEO. This score card measures the performance of senior leadership on the 6 aspects of Safety interaction, Gemba walk, Employee Mass communication, One Safety Project in each quarter, Monthly Safety Tests and Personal Safety Action Plan review of direct reportee.

This score card is being reviewed on monthly basis at the Corporate Safety Council meeting, chaired by the Company CEO.

Occupational Health Management

In FY 2020-21, we initiated the Occupational Health Assessment / Industrial Hygiene project in collaboration with M/s International Safety Systems (ISS) Inc. The objective of this association was to establish a safe, healthy, and productive environment at our job sites.

The project focused on two key areas, namely:

Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) commitment for safe operations and strengthening the safety culture.

Providing an overview on industrial hygiene (IH) and inducting IH champions at individual sites, to characterize health hazards from various performed job tasks and also to aid the medical staff to implement medical surveillance and biological monitoring.

Hindustan Zinc has characterized the various hazards at five mines and four smelters. In addition, an industrial hygiene risk assessment (Qualitative Exposure Assessment [QLEA]), as well as Quantitative Exposure Assessment (QNEA) have been completed for two smelters and one mine. In FY 2021-22, QLEA and QNEA will be completed for remaining sites. The major outcome of this study is the quantification of the employee exposure to various physical and chemical agents at the individual sites, and to develop control strategies to reduce potential health risk.

To empower our employees in industrial hygiene and occupational health, Hindustan Zinc has conducted several virtual training workshops. Hindustan Zinc is also working closely with medical professionals in developing and implementing targeted medical surveillance program. The training program includes a holistic training methodology, combining aspects of execution capabilities and behavioral skills.

The overall expectation of the successful implementation of the IH program includes:

  • Improved employee health and increased life expectancy
  • Reduction in the number of people who may leave employment early through injury or illness
  • Lower social and healthcare costs as well as maximizing employee potential
  • More efficient working processes with technological improvements and increased productivity
There are no cases of occupational health illness reported during the year.
During the year, 16,732 initial and periodical medical examinations were conducted.