January 17, 2002

   Shri Ram Naik, Minister of Petroleum & Natural Gas has urged the Members of the Oil Industry to take corrective measures by improving supervision and ensuring strict adherence to the laid-down safety norms. Expressing concern over incidents of fire and accidents in oil installations, Shri Naik asked Oil Industry to reinforce their efforts and eliminate the unfortunate accidents. The Minister said this while he was presenting the Oil Industry Safety Awards during the XII Safety Workshop, organized by the Oil Industry Safety Directorate (OISD), here today. He emphasised the need of training the workmen of both the Company and Contractors on the hazards associated with the job and the correct procedures. This is important as OISD’s incident analysis has indicated pre-dominance of human factor in the accidents.

    While presenting the Awards, Shri Naik observed that despite a lot of improvement achieved over the years, he was concerned at the incidents of fires and accidents. He informed that the oil industry has recorded 21 fatalities in 2000-01, 27 in 1999-2000 and 29 in 1998-99. This year upto December 2001, 30 precious lives have been lost. Majority of these cases was at construction/maintenance sites involving contractor working. The incidents of major fire in the installations were 44, 35 and 46 respectively during these years. This year there have been only 13 such incidents upto December 2001. The Minister called for proper inspection and maintenance of the plants and surveillance as nearly 50 per cent of fire occurred due to equipment failure and consequent leak of hydrocarbon.

    Commending ONGC for its timely and effective tackling recent fire at an oil well in Gujarat caused by miscreants, Shri Naik pointed out that many fire incidents are being reported from the upstream sector due to pilferage and theft from oil wells and pipelines. "The fire has exposed weakness in security at our installations. All out efforts must be made to prevent such untoward incidents", the Minister underlined.

    Earlier in the day, Shri Santosh Kumar Gangwar, Minister of State for Petroleum & Natural Gas, while inaugurating the two-day Workshop, has said in the post-APM scenario, the oil industry will be expanding its activities manifold focussing improvement of the quality of products and modernisation of various operations. This again will call for the oil industry to efficiently manage the emerging challenges of safe operations, Shri Gangwar said. He underlined that industrial accidents adversely affect everyone including the concerned sector, the country and the people. Therefore, safety is Number One Priority for the oil sector. Shri Naresh Narad, Additional Secretary in the Petroleum Ministry also called for measures to eliminate negligence and change mindset of the people to follow safety norms voluntarily while aiming a zero-accident industry.

The following are the Prize Winning Organisations for the years 1999-2000 and 200-2001 under seven categories:

    Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas constituted the Safety Council in 1986 and OISD under the direction of Safety Council has been closely working with the industry for continual improvement in safety of Hydrocarbon industry. OISD’s role include standardization, External Safety Audits, Pre-commissioning inspection of new projects, Accident Investigation and providing regular feed back to the industry based on technological improvements and incident analysis.