We have leadership teams in organizations, who value importance of HSE in their business

HC1 is a company owned by Galaxy Investment Pte Ltd. (Galaxy). Galaxy is an investment management company owned by KKR. It is a road platform that manages and operates road assets held by InvIT named as Highways Infrastructure Trust (HC1). HC1 is the Investment Manager (IM) of HC1. We spoke to Vicky Pagare, Assistant General Manager (AGM) – Health, Safety, Environment & Social, Highway Concessions One Pvt Ltd to know more about their HSE initiatives.

Interviewed by Adeesh Sharma & Nisha Biradar

Please tell us about your organization and its focus areas in HSE

Highway Concessions One (HC1)

HC1 is a company owned by Galaxy Investment Pte Ltd. (“Galaxy”). Galaxy is an investment management company owned by KKR. It is a road platform that manages and operates road assets held by InvIT named as Highways Infrastructure Trust (HC1). HC1 is in the Investment Manager (IM) of HC1.

HC1 currently has 13 Road Projects (National Highways) all over India and looking to acquire more. Our main scope of work is to maintain these roads and collect toll revenue. The main work activities carried out at our sites are.

• Highway Maintenance – Cleaning of road furniture, signboards, kerbs, shoulders; Median Grass Cutting & trimming, Repairing potholes etc.
• Toll Operations – We operate Toll Plazas and collect the revenue.
• Incident Management – We provide emergency assistance to road users travelling on our roads. For this purpose, we have ambulance, crane and patrolling vehicles at each of our projects.

HSE Focus Areas

Our key HSE Focus is to ensure that our employees & workers are always safeguarded and free from any incidents. For carrying our project activities, our employees & workers are exposed to live traffic all the time. It is our prime responsibility to make sure each of our site has all required safety controls implemented and we provide all resources to them for these implementations.

What challenges do you face as a key HSE professional?

In Roads O & M Sector, Working with Live Traffic is most high risk task. Our workers work on National Highways (for road maintenance activities) wherein vehicles ply at a speed more than 100 kmph.

As we all know, the driver behavior is not in our control most of the times. There are many instances on daily basis, of over speeding, rash driving, not following lane discipline, drunken driving, long hours driving etc. Hence our workers are always exposed to a safety risk of getting hit by speedy vehicles & it becomes a challenging task to safeguard our workers working on these roads amidst moving vehicles.

What strategies/solutions you deploy to alleviate those challenges?

Our main aim is to safeguard our workers working on live roads and ensure they return back home safely every day. For this reason, it was necessary to assess the risks involved and assess the control measures to mitigate this risk to as low as reasonably practicable. In road maintenance activity, it is important to ensure the passing vehicles slow down while passing near work zone where our workers are working. For vehicles to slow down, we need to have following elements in place.

• Advance Warning to vehicles well before the work zone (atleast 500m before the work zone).
• Transition / Tapering by safety cones – to provide time to vehicle to turn towards lane opposite to the one where work zone is situated.
• Zig Zag Barriers – to force vehicle to slow down.
• Isolation of work area by safety cones – to separate work zone from the actual road.

Keeping above elements in mind, we have developed Traffic Management Plans for every maintenance work activity on road. These plans comprise of all above elements and are separately developed for different type of maintenance activities based on the location (median / fast lane / slow lane) and duration of work. These plans are communicated to site management team through a special On-The-Job training which includes classroom sessions as well as practical demonstrations. Apart from this, we also have a Permit to Work system which ensures the implementation of these Traffic Management Plans are monitored and approved by competent person at site before start of works.

What are your views on current HSE scenario in Indian industries and what more needs to be done to change it?

While looking out all around, it seems the HSE scenario in India has been improving day by day, as compared to the situation 10 years back. We have leadership teams in organizations, who value importance of HSE in their business. There are many innovative ideas being implemented and it feels good to see people following safety norms diligently. But I still feel there are few grey areas which needs to be addressed. I have listed it down the same below .

Communication and Collaboration on the Site

A construction project is a complex and multifaceted endeavour that requires a harmonious and collaborative effort from all parties involved. Effective communication is a crucial element that fosters seamless collaboration among the workers, enabling them to work towards shared goals and objectives. When communication channels are open, and the team is engaged, addressing safety concerns becomes a collective responsibility, ensuring a safer working environment for everyone involved.

Safety Ownership & Commitment – Many times we observe that safety implementations and culture is driven by safety professionals in the organization. This although is effective for short term, but I feel it will not have consistency in long term. Also, safety driven only by safety professionals, does not help in developing a good safety culture in organizations. I feel it is very important that implementation of safety protocols should be owned by line management and should be integrated in work methods itself. We need to bring in a culture where line management team consider themselves as a safety officer of their work location. They should feel responsible for safety of their working team members. Whereas safety professionals should be only in advisory role at site.

Such integration and ownership will be very effective in long term and ensure that the safety culture sustains within the organization on its own.

Contractor Safety Management – In some of the sectors like roads O & M, the contractors are yet not that matured enough to understand importance of safety. They have more focus on revenue and completing the works swiftly to save the cost. It is important that such contractors to be evaluated before awarding any work and can be discarded if they don’t qualify in this evaluation. Such system will bring in competition within the contractors, which eventually will enforce them to imbibe safety management system in their organization.

. What new HSE initiatives are you planning to implement within your organization in the near future ?

We have planned to implement following new HSE Initiatives in our organization .

• Developing animation videos on Traffic Management and safe working on live roads. This is to be done to ensure better understanding by workers at ground level. Animation videos will attract workers and help them understand the minute details regarding traffic management.
• Usage of machineries in place of manpower – Deploying machines to maintain roads (for grass cutting, cleaning activity etc) will reduce the presence of manpower on road. So if the manpower on road is reduced, it will eventually reduce the safety risk and injuries.