Occupational Heat Stress and Workplace Accident Risk Assessment in the Indian Fireworks Manufacturing Industry

Being one of the major contributors in fireworks industry, India also possesses some serious threats when it comes to occupational hazards in the industry. In India, the highest percentage of crackers are manufactured in a city called Sivakasi. As a part of this paper, several published works in authentic journals have been reviewed to collect the data regarding the accidents in fireworks industries in India.  It has been analysed through the review that The potential hazards associated in these types of industries basically are burn and explosion hazard, manufacturing hazard and respiratory hazard[3]. Manufacturing hazards can be cause by numerous factors such as generation of spark by friction and sudden impact forces during filling operation, carelessness in handling of materials, mixing wrong proportion of chemicals that can lead to thermal decomposition[4]. It has been found that there are no standard procedures or methods for manufacturing and for mixing the proportion of the chemicals, in addition to it the workers have no idea about the hazardous nature of the chemicals they are handling as they do not have any training for these types of jobs [7]. As fireworks industries are associated with dealing harmful and explosive chemicals so it is considered as one of the most hazardous industries since no or barely few safety protocols are there. As a part of study, we found out that most of the fireworks is manufactured in southern part of the country. As a matter of fact, the average temperature of the southern region of India remains on the higher side thus it is probably a good research idea to calculate the heat index of all the days on which accident occurred in fireworks industries in India for the past few years. As a conclusion of several studies, we found out that several works have been carried out in the past on hazards associated with fireworks industries globally. But there has been no prior work done in order to quantify the accident data to understand the loopholes of the system. All we have is qualitative analysis of the accidents discussing the hazardous processes. So, even after so many studies, accidents do occur in fireworks industries hampering numerous lives every year. Thus, it is the need of the hour to perform quantitative analysis of the accidents in order to investigate the neglected aspects of accidents in fireworks industries in India.

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