President of Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI), Junaid Esmail Makda has said that some of the crucial laws on health, safety and environment enacted since 1974 are quite comprehensive; nevertheless, the performance in both public and private organisations still remains poor.
"It appears there has been knowledge gap among industrial managers and health, safety and environment professionals regarding various laws," he said, speaking at the 5th International Environment, Health & Safety Conference.
Makda emphasised the need to bridge aforesaid gap by thoroughly knowing and fully understanding all relevant Acts and Rules. He noted there were more than a dozen laws for health, safety and environment but their enforcement was too weak.
He suggested that ensuring the health and safety of people and maintaining a healthy working environment should be deemed priority for all businesses. He said industries in Pakistan need to ensure a safe work place for their employees and contribute to improvements in environment. To him, good environmental practice means good business practice.
KCCI president said that businesses could enhance efficiency through environment-friendly technology and optimising products and processes and saving energy and natural resources. He underlined the need that companies in Pakistan need to invest in environmental, health and safety programs involving extensive health & safety training, safety audits, incident investigation and safety communications.
"Safety is an aspect of business that needs to be defined well at all levels of an organisation," he suggested, adding that it should be the most stressed-upon factor at the annual board meetings of companies and to be the centre attention for all business domains.
He said considerable investments need to be made, not just in physical infrastructure but also in terms of creating an institutional architecture where health and safety are monitored at every level of the organisational hierarchy. "As a responsible corporate citizen, KCCI is playing a significant role in creating awareness and educating businesses to implement programs regarding issues of health, safety and environmental degradation," he said.
Commissioner Karachi Iftekhar Ahmed Shalwani lamented that citizens were piling up their garbage in front of houses, etc, creating problems. He said government was taking steps to lift the garbage through a proper mechanism but the city of 20 million people could not resolve garbage and other issues through 9000 sanitary workers.
He urged that citizen should play their individual role to support and resolve the issues through social awareness and knowledge about their duties and responsibilities. He suggested to civil society that it should be their priority to educate and the general public about their environment, health and safety so that every citizen could get good health, clean environment and ensure proper security and safety at every level.
Shalwani said people are belonging to respective fields lack training and capacity as they had experienced sort of environmental and safety accidents/incidents, including fire and building collapse in the city areas of Malir, Gulshan and Boat Basin, etc, they had faced problems and difficulties for said reasons. Those others who spoke included: Senator Abdul Haseeb Khan, Javed Jabbar, Ateeque Rehaman.
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