The Expertise and the Practice of Loss Prevention in the Indian Process Industry: Some Pointers for the Third World

In spite of great advances being made globally in the knowledge and competence pertaining to loss prevention in process industry, especially post-Bhopal, accidents continue to occur in all parts of the world. But such accidents generally take a greater toll of life in developing countries due to larger population densities there compared to the developed ones. The damage control machinery and the process of compensating the victims are also much less rigorous in developing countries. In this paper we present an assessment of the status of loss prevention in the Indian process industry. In many ways the Indian situation embodies the best and the worst of what exists in the third world. On one extreme is the very high quantity and quality of technical manpower and other forms of expertise available in India. On the other extreme is a lumbering bureaucracy which continues to stoutly resist all attempts to reform it, and a public welfare system still far away from being as prompt and fair as would become the world's largest democracy that India is. The situation in most other third world countries lies within these extremes. It is, therefore, a small wonder that the world's worst ever process industry disaster—the Bhopal gas tragedy— and the world's worst process industry accident of the previous decade (the Vishakhapatnam HPCL refinery disaster) have both occurred in the third world, coincidentally in India! Most of the high-casualty accidents of the current millennium have also occurred in the third world. In this paper we present an analysis of the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy and the loss prevention initiatives it had prompted. We then recount the Vishakhapatnam disaster of 1997 which reveals that most of the lessons of Bhopal seemed to have been forgotten. We also present an overview of the considerable expertise in loss prevention available in India and how this expertise is underutilized. Finally we emphasize the fact that the cultural, socio-political, demographic, and infrastructural factors prevailing in India (and indeed most of the third world) being markedly different from the ones in the developed world, further R&D on loss prevention in India should be specifically oriented towards the Indian situation. Such an R&D ought to provide continuous feedback to the government for refining the concerned legislation.