Evaluation of Safety Performance in a Construction Organization in India: A Study

In India the construction industry is the second largest employer next to agriculture and about 31 million people are employed in construction sector. Indian construction industry is labour intensive comprising of semi- skilled and unskilled workers. The measurement and evaluation of an organization's performance on health and safety conditions at work mainly aims at the provision of information about the current situation and the progress of the strategies, processes and activities that are adopted by an organization with the view to keep H&S hazards under control. The construction industry needs a new paradigm for measuring safety performance on construction sites that is a proactive approach rather than just depending on the reactive data. The proactive approach is able to provide essential feedback on performance before incidents occur. This paper presents proactive safety measures to eliminate unsafe actions/conditions which contribute towards accidents and injuries by conducting safety sampling survey and overall safety performance was evaluated by inter observer reliability of internal and external safety auditors. The study was conducted in a large construction organization, certified under OHSAS 18001 and involved in construction of high rise buildings in India. 1. Introduction The construction industry has often been criticised for its poor performance in health and safety. Brown commented that the manner in which safety is managed in the construction industry has not radically changed over the years [1]. In the manufacturing sector, the working environment and the work methods remain essentially unchanged from day to day. On the other hand, on a construction site, the working environment, the work to be done, and the composition of workers changes continuously. The continuous change generates a greater risk for construction processes, which potentially exposes the workers to unforeseen and unaccustomed hazards. Anderson argued that there are several factors in the construction industry that seem to conspire to create “barriers” to significant widespread safety improvement [2–4]. These include shortcomings in the present general level of health and safety education, general apathy and complacency towards health and safety issues, lack of quality and commitment of site management to give site safety issues the priority they need and/or deserve, lack of sufficient resources allocated to health and safety, overemphasis at site level on production objectives to the obvious detriment of good safe working practices, failure of government to put