Why is there a lack of safety culture?
I found that the indifference towards safety procedures was not for any selfish gain. The main reason was that safety demanded hard work. The blue collar worker in those days was not really given to hard work. Many workers were undisciplined, often showed up late for work, left their workstations without waiting for their relievers to arrive, believed they needed to work only if they were paid, ‘overtime’, and negligence was the order of the day. Things don’t seem to have changed much even today. At the LPG plant, the guy who was supposed to write the ‘tare weight’ on the empty cylinders to ensure that the ‘carousel’ filled the right quantity of LPG was often missing. The worker supposed to man the ‘check scale’ was hardly ever there, and the man at the ‘compact valve testing machine’ kept allowing cylinders on the conveyor to bypass valve tests. Workers were just not willing to work according to prescribed procedures and the officers turned a blind eye to this, afraid of strikes and b
