Ratan Tata, Chairman Emeritus of Tata Sons, is known to always understand the pains of people, including the workers. This got reiterated in a book ‘# TATA STORIES 40 timeless tales to inspire you’ in which the author Harish Bhat writes that Ratan Tata used to visit the Indica car manufacturing facilities quite often in the 1990s.
On one such early visit to the Indica car manufacturing facility, he noticed operators fixing the rear strut of the car manually. The operator would have to bend down 600 times to complete this operation on 300 cars each day.
Ratan Tata called his managers immediately. ‘How can we expect our men to do this throughout their lives? Surely it will damage their health. We must provide an automation solution on priority.’
The engineering department rose to the occasion and quickly developed a fixture to semi-automate the operation.
Operators remember this fondly even today.
Since Indica car was launched in 1998, this visit by Ratan Tata to the Indica car manufacturing facility must have been around 1996-97. That was also the time when I was fine-tuning the OH (Occupational Health) standards in Oman where I worked with Petroleum Development Oman (a Shell OpCo).
Similarly, the idea behind the Nano car has been Ratan Tata’s vision of providing a safe and comfortable medium of transport to millions of Indian families that use two-wheeled vehicles to travel with their family (spouse and children) of 4-5 persons under extreme weather conditions in summer, winter and during monsoon.
Occupational Health (OH) at a basic level requires alertness, compassion, and willingness.
It is worth noting that OH is practiced unknowingly by all – be it an autorickshaw driver (by wearing a mask if roads are dusty), a homemaker (keeping windows of the kitchen open while cooking), an office goer (by adjusting the chair before sitting), an industrialist (as in the case of Ratan Tata), even our Prime Minister Narendra Modi (by giving gas connection so that poor women have the clean cooking gas advantage as the use of fossil fuel was damaging their health and the environment).
Occupational Health (OH) at a basic level requires alertness, compassion, and willingness. Alertness identifies a problem of the worker, compassion is about understanding the suffering faced, and willingness is the action taken to alleviate the suffering.
Ratan Tata did exactly that – he demonstrated alertness by identifying the problem the workers were having during his visit, had compassion towards the suffering of the workers by saying, ‘How can we expect our men to do this throughout their lives? Surely it will damage their health,’ and finally took action willingly by calling his mangers and saying, ‘We must provide an automation solution on priority.’
Ratan Tata is an Indian industrialist and philanthropist. He is recipient of India’s second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan. Ratan Tata was educated at the Cornell University in the United States, where he studied architecture and structural engineering, He has studied Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School.
I chanced upon reading about Ratan Tata, but am sure there must be lots of industrialists, entrepreneurs and owners of MSME who consciously practice OH because of their admiration of the employees.
If we all exhibit alertness, compassion and willingness at workplace we would be able to identify and mitigate a lot of risks to health on our own at a basic level. For any other complex work-related risk to health, inputs from an OH physician must be sought.
To understand Occupational Health contact
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Dr Ajay Sati is an Occupational Health physician who prefers to describe himself as an Occupationist, to denote, ‘an expert in diseases and other concerns of occupations’. Dr Sati has managed health and wellness programs in industries he worked, like the atomic energy, and energy (oil & gas) in India and overseas. He was involved in many greenfield and brownfield projects providing inputs from health point of view. Known for SOPs and protocols, he is currently involved with an energy MNC in designing protocols to support employees during the covid pandemic, and protocols to safely reopen offices and plants.
