Coal India’s (CIL) concentrated focus on ensuring safety of its workmen resulted in fatalities and fatal accidents falling by a third in 2022. Fatalities have hit an all-time low of 20 in 2022 coming down by 31% in a year compared to 29 recorded in 2021. CIL’s safety statistics are computed on calendar year basis.
Demonstrating a downward trend, fatal accidents were also reduced by one-third to18 in 2022. Comparatively the same were 27 in 2021.
Fatality rate per million tonne (MT) of coal produced was 0.028 in 2022 decreasing sizeably by 40% against 0.047 of 2021. Coal production during the referred period has gone up by 71 MTs. CIL as whole produced 688 MTs during the calendar year of 2022 against 617 MTs in the preceding year.
CIL had implemented ‘Root Cause Analysis Techniques’, the process of exploring and analysing the accident causing factors in a bid to identify appropriate solutions to systematically prevent the mishaps. The company has inked a Memorandum of Understanding with (IIT) Indian School of Mines (ISM) Dhanbad to train 100 executives to equip them with RCA techniques and solve the underlying safety hazards.
Tool Box Safety Talk is yet another effective tool to assess safety related hazards before beginning the mining operations and helps employees in awareness of safety issues. Safety supervisors have interaction on safety issues with miners. To inculcate safety alertness on a broader level, mine rescue and safety competitions are conducted at mine, area and company levels periodically.
Western Coalfields Limited, a subsidiary of CIL was ranked 3rd in the mine rescue skills category in the prestigious International Mine Rescue Competition held in September 2022. It was organized in the USA by Mines Safety and Health Administration under US Department of Labour in Beaver, West Virginia. WCL was the sole Indian company to have emerged victorious. A total of 22 teams representing eight nations participated in the competition.
CIL views safety holistically to make all its mining operations safe and hazard free, and lays as much importance on safety of its miners, mines and machines as any other performance parameters.
