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The good thing about Kerala is that almost all our tradesmen are unionized even if there are in unorganized sector. For example, we have All-Kerala Tailors' Union and Barbers' Union, in addition to hundreds (if not thousands) of other unions. They have a structure, office bearers, and they meet at least once a year. While these unions are splintered on partly lines, in my understanding almost every tradesman in Kerala is linked to at least one organization that represents their trade. I often see posters announcing their state conventions and sometime I even see jathas. Things have progress so much in
Kerala that I think last year we even had an All India Sex-workers' meeting in Trichur followed by a jatha. I have not been to one of these all-Kerala convention of any trade union, but my friends who have been to such gatherings tell me it has the following format. There is typically a day-long session where part of the time is spent debating about the challenges facing that profession (for example, port workers may debate about container terminals, head-load workers about forklift trucks). Some time is spent on strategies for collective bargaining for that profession to enhance earning and prestige. Some of the time is scheduled for election of new office bearers. In the evening, there will be a massive jatha to demonstrate their strength to the community and this will be addressed by the highest level political person they have access to.
To a safety professional, such degree of organization and cohesion is a dream. There is no better venue of communicating safety messages to a certain group of tradesmen than their annual meeting. If only we could engage the leaders of these groups (head-load workers or banana-chip makers) to get one hour during this annual meeting where a professional expert who has reviewed the work-cycle of a specific trade (e.g., banana-chip making) could give an audio-visual presentation explaining the safety risks and making specific suggestions on improving the same, it would go a long way. This is for two
reasons: firstly, it will contribute to the safety culture in the tradespeople and reinforce that safety is as important as emerging threats, wages, and politics. Secondly, it will show them specifically what risks are involved and what to do about it. (For some of you, who may have thought I was trivializing the issue by including banana-chip makers in the group, let me illustrate the safety risk faced by this individual. There are four issues to be considered as a minimum. Firstly, he is almost always standing
close to boiling oil which could fall on his body anytime. Secondly, he is working close to a fire that can spread. Thirdly, he works with a sharp equipment to cut the banana into slices. Fourthly, he is standing most of the day without break. For me, every shop making banana chips is one minute away from a disaster at any point of time.)
I should conclude by introducing three additional pathways through which the message of community based safety should be propagated. These are three groups of people who have significant ability to influence the behavior of people in Kerala. I am talking about politicians, film stars, and religious leaders. In the Western world I would have said businessmen, sports stars, and pop stars (in a recent poll on role models in UK, Richard Branson, the boss of Virgin Group was polled ahead of Jesus
Christ). However, in Kerala, sportspersons do not command such influence in Kerala, whereas religious leaders still do.
I know there is an ongoing debate in Kerala on banning public meetings on roadsides. I am not sure what the background of this debate is. However, from a safety point of view, assembling people, for whatever reason, on the side of public roads through which traffic is moving, is a major safety issue. I think a number of political activists were killed few years back in the high ranges (Pothanikkad?) when a lorry lost control and drove into a group of people attending a meeting. But this is not my topic today. I know for a fact that regardless of our pretentions about politicians, they play very vital role in our life. So if all the political parties where to include one sentence in their party manifesto next election that we will work towards making Kerala a safer place it will set the right tone for creating a new safety culture in Kerala. Of course, this should then be backed by safe behavior on the part of our leaders in public too. So high-speed driving on the highways by ministers' cars and their drivers
should be an absolute no-no!! (I must say that this issue of Ministers driving at high speed is an issue of perception lasting longer than reality. In the 12 months I spent in Kerala, I have come across, ahead, and behind many ministers' vehicles, and none of them were doing high-speed races; most even did not have police escorts or pilots.)
In Kathaparayumbol, Mammooty says that art forms do not have significant impact on people's behavior citing the poem'Mampazham'. However, I think he is only partly right. Both the art form and the artists in the film field have significant influence over our population and this should be harnessed. On one side, I think we should teach our censor board to censor any situation where there is an unsafe behavior on screen (e.g., three boys on one bike, standing on the bike, etc.). This should be enforced the way we are enforcing no-smoking scenes in the film. Secondly, we should ask our film stars, during their million interviews to put a word on safe behavior. For example, Mohanlal can make a plea on the eve of Christmas not to drink and drive or Mammootty can talk about the importance of not using mobile phones while driving. Naturally, they must also behave in a safe manner as they are often in the public domain.
Finally, I will come to the role that religious leaders can play. I think religious practices are on the rebound in Kerala. There are more and more religious institutions and occasions where people meet. It would go a long way if Matha Amrithananda Mayi, during one of her speeches, talks about safety. When I was in Brunei, the local imams, in their speech after Friday prayers, used to urge the congregation regarding the importance of safe driving. Though not a religious person myself, I cannot
imagine there is anything controversial or contravening to religious practice in trying to be safe. Naturally, this should then be operationalized by having our religious affairs also assessed from a safety point of view. For me, the primary target is the fireworks, which regularly results in accidents and deaths. I enjoy fireworks as much as anybody else, but the degree of control that currently exists in our fireworks management is totally insufficient. Advice of professional safety experts should be
sought while designing the fireworks. Key issues to be considered are the location of the storage, nature of storage, venues of fireworks displays, location of audience, and contingency planning (first aid, crowd control, and fire fighting) if something were to go wrong. The second issue is of crowd management during religious events. We have hundreds and thousands of people travelling to attend religious events and congregating in one place, both of which have safety implications. Our religious
leaders and systems taking a more proactive role in managing these would also go a long way in not only making the believer safer but also reinforcing the overall safety culture in the state.
Of course, what I have mentioned above is my dream. The ideal situation where we get the entire community sensitized and trained. If we start now, and assuming we have unlimited resources and continuous backing, this could be achieved in a decade. However, the good thing about safety is that it is modular, incremental and mutually reinforcing. So we don't need all these elements to be in place before we start to see results. Even if we only get school children or auto riskhaw drivers, it will have an impact and that impact can be measured. As and when other segments of the society joins in, the impact will increase and once they all work together, even without deliberate collaboration, the impact will magnify.
While the overall tone of my articles has been the importance of us taking ownership of our safety, I am realistic enough to understand that the type of mass mobilization needed to reach it to all segment of the society would need an interface with Government at some point. Government intervention will be needed to (a) create the massive amount of trainers to impart the training and (b) infrastructure needed to impart the training. Of course this could be done similar to the total literacy campaign and other similar initiatives. But in addition to spreading of the safety message and skills, we also need Government support in one more aspect. This is in integrating the available skills and resources and creating a facilitative environment where the sum of the effort is more than the total of the individual efforts. A command and control system will be needed as well as a system for communicating during emergencies. This means that we should be able to create a system whereby the skills of school
teachers, auto riskhwa drivers and headload workers are aligned and put to more collective use than just tackling only safety issues in their own homes or working domain.
As I mentioned previously, while Kerala is prone to multiple hazards (rain, wind, seismic), we do not have luckily lave massive disasters leading to thousands of causalities as in other parts of the country. I don't think we had even one such incident in our collective memory or recorded history. As I keep mentioning, Tsunami, which is the biggest single disaster event in the memory of our generation, in Kerala we lost 212 lives. We lose more than that in road accidents every month. We probably
lose more people to drowning per year than that. So preparing everybody in the state for the arrival of a 'massive disaster' encompassing the whole state is probably overdoing it. However, there are villages in Kerala which are more prone to disasters than others. These involve coastal villages and villages in the high ranges. It should be possible for us to identify those villages which have a history of natural hazards and create a system whereby the community is prepared to handle those hazards.
I am aware that the new Disaster Management Policy of Kerala calls for creation of such capacity. So whatever suggestions I have made in this article are very much in line with the policy of the Government of Kerala. The skill pool, once created, can be easily organized in different formation so as to handle any type of emergency, be it a boat accident involving a dozen people or a flooding event involving 10,000.
My article will conclude with a final section on how do we integrate the resources in the community with those of the official systems. How do we leverage on our social capital to maximize preparedness. I am looking forward to specific comments from readers on any related topic you wish to be covered in the final article.
Stay safe
(Muralee Thummarukudy is Emergency Management Expert with over 15 years of experience in Industry and United Nations. Muralee frequently blogs about safety issues at http://www.muraleethummarukudy.com
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations.)
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Kerala that I think last year we even had an All India Sex-workers' meeting in Trichur followed by a jatha. I have not been to one of these all-Kerala convention of any trade union, but my friends who have been to such gatherings tell me it has the following format. There is typically a day-long session where part of the time is spent debating about the challenges facing that profession (for example, port workers may debate about container terminals, head-load workers about forklift trucks). Some time is spent on strategies for collective bargaining for that profession to enhance earning and prestige. Some of the time is scheduled for election of new office bearers. In the evening, there will be a massive jatha to demonstrate their strength to the community and this will be addressed by the highest level political person they have access to.
To a safety professional, such degree of organization and cohesion is a dream. There is no better venue of communicating safety messages to a certain group of tradesmen than their annual meeting. If only we could engage the leaders of these groups (head-load workers or banana-chip makers) to get one hour during this annual meeting where a professional expert who has reviewed the work-cycle of a specific trade (e.g., banana-chip making) could give an audio-visual presentation explaining the safety risks and making specific suggestions on improving the same, it would go a long way. This is for two
reasons: firstly, it will contribute to the safety culture in the tradespeople and reinforce that safety is as important as emerging threats, wages, and politics. Secondly, it will show them specifically what risks are involved and what to do about it. (For some of you, who may have thought I was trivializing the issue by including banana-chip makers in the group, let me illustrate the safety risk faced by this individual. There are four issues to be considered as a minimum. Firstly, he is almost always standing
close to boiling oil which could fall on his body anytime. Secondly, he is working close to a fire that can spread. Thirdly, he works with a sharp equipment to cut the banana into slices. Fourthly, he is standing most of the day without break. For me, every shop making banana chips is one minute away from a disaster at any point of time.)
I should conclude by introducing three additional pathways through which the message of community based safety should be propagated. These are three groups of people who have significant ability to influence the behavior of people in Kerala. I am talking about politicians, film stars, and religious leaders. In the Western world I would have said businessmen, sports stars, and pop stars (in a recent poll on role models in UK, Richard Branson, the boss of Virgin Group was polled ahead of Jesus
Christ). However, in Kerala, sportspersons do not command such influence in Kerala, whereas religious leaders still do.
I know there is an ongoing debate in Kerala on banning public meetings on roadsides. I am not sure what the background of this debate is. However, from a safety point of view, assembling people, for whatever reason, on the side of public roads through which traffic is moving, is a major safety issue. I think a number of political activists were killed few years back in the high ranges (Pothanikkad?) when a lorry lost control and drove into a group of people attending a meeting. But this is not my topic today. I know for a fact that regardless of our pretentions about politicians, they play very vital role in our life. So if all the political parties where to include one sentence in their party manifesto next election that we will work towards making Kerala a safer place it will set the right tone for creating a new safety culture in Kerala. Of course, this should then be backed by safe behavior on the part of our leaders in public too. So high-speed driving on the highways by ministers' cars and their drivers
should be an absolute no-no!! (I must say that this issue of Ministers driving at high speed is an issue of perception lasting longer than reality. In the 12 months I spent in Kerala, I have come across, ahead, and behind many ministers' vehicles, and none of them were doing high-speed races; most even did not have police escorts or pilots.)
In Kathaparayumbol, Mammooty says that art forms do not have significant impact on people's behavior citing the poem'Mampazham'. However, I think he is only partly right. Both the art form and the artists in the film field have significant influence over our population and this should be harnessed. On one side, I think we should teach our censor board to censor any situation where there is an unsafe behavior on screen (e.g., three boys on one bike, standing on the bike, etc.). This should be enforced the way we are enforcing no-smoking scenes in the film. Secondly, we should ask our film stars, during their million interviews to put a word on safe behavior. For example, Mohanlal can make a plea on the eve of Christmas not to drink and drive or Mammootty can talk about the importance of not using mobile phones while driving. Naturally, they must also behave in a safe manner as they are often in the public domain.
Finally, I will come to the role that religious leaders can play. I think religious practices are on the rebound in Kerala. There are more and more religious institutions and occasions where people meet. It would go a long way if Matha Amrithananda Mayi, during one of her speeches, talks about safety. When I was in Brunei, the local imams, in their speech after Friday prayers, used to urge the congregation regarding the importance of safe driving. Though not a religious person myself, I cannot
imagine there is anything controversial or contravening to religious practice in trying to be safe. Naturally, this should then be operationalized by having our religious affairs also assessed from a safety point of view. For me, the primary target is the fireworks, which regularly results in accidents and deaths. I enjoy fireworks as much as anybody else, but the degree of control that currently exists in our fireworks management is totally insufficient. Advice of professional safety experts should be
sought while designing the fireworks. Key issues to be considered are the location of the storage, nature of storage, venues of fireworks displays, location of audience, and contingency planning (first aid, crowd control, and fire fighting) if something were to go wrong. The second issue is of crowd management during religious events. We have hundreds and thousands of people travelling to attend religious events and congregating in one place, both of which have safety implications. Our religious
leaders and systems taking a more proactive role in managing these would also go a long way in not only making the believer safer but also reinforcing the overall safety culture in the state.
Of course, what I have mentioned above is my dream. The ideal situation where we get the entire community sensitized and trained. If we start now, and assuming we have unlimited resources and continuous backing, this could be achieved in a decade. However, the good thing about safety is that it is modular, incremental and mutually reinforcing. So we don't need all these elements to be in place before we start to see results. Even if we only get school children or auto riskhaw drivers, it will have an impact and that impact can be measured. As and when other segments of the society joins in, the impact will increase and once they all work together, even without deliberate collaboration, the impact will magnify.
While the overall tone of my articles has been the importance of us taking ownership of our safety, I am realistic enough to understand that the type of mass mobilization needed to reach it to all segment of the society would need an interface with Government at some point. Government intervention will be needed to (a) create the massive amount of trainers to impart the training and (b) infrastructure needed to impart the training. Of course this could be done similar to the total literacy campaign and other similar initiatives. But in addition to spreading of the safety message and skills, we also need Government support in one more aspect. This is in integrating the available skills and resources and creating a facilitative environment where the sum of the effort is more than the total of the individual efforts. A command and control system will be needed as well as a system for communicating during emergencies. This means that we should be able to create a system whereby the skills of school
teachers, auto riskhwa drivers and headload workers are aligned and put to more collective use than just tackling only safety issues in their own homes or working domain.
As I mentioned previously, while Kerala is prone to multiple hazards (rain, wind, seismic), we do not have luckily lave massive disasters leading to thousands of causalities as in other parts of the country. I don't think we had even one such incident in our collective memory or recorded history. As I keep mentioning, Tsunami, which is the biggest single disaster event in the memory of our generation, in Kerala we lost 212 lives. We lose more than that in road accidents every month. We probably
lose more people to drowning per year than that. So preparing everybody in the state for the arrival of a 'massive disaster' encompassing the whole state is probably overdoing it. However, there are villages in Kerala which are more prone to disasters than others. These involve coastal villages and villages in the high ranges. It should be possible for us to identify those villages which have a history of natural hazards and create a system whereby the community is prepared to handle those hazards.
I am aware that the new Disaster Management Policy of Kerala calls for creation of such capacity. So whatever suggestions I have made in this article are very much in line with the policy of the Government of Kerala. The skill pool, once created, can be easily organized in different formation so as to handle any type of emergency, be it a boat accident involving a dozen people or a flooding event involving 10,000.
My article will conclude with a final section on how do we integrate the resources in the community with those of the official systems. How do we leverage on our social capital to maximize preparedness. I am looking forward to specific comments from readers on any related topic you wish to be covered in the final article.
Stay safe
(Muralee Thummarukudy is Emergency Management Expert with over 15 years of experience in Industry and United Nations. Muralee frequently blogs about safety issues at http://www.muraleethummarukudy.com
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations.)
Full Text RSS Feeds | ShareWorx Social Network