Workplace safety: Mobile app ‘to improve oversight of inspections’

Inspection of industrial units will begin once the app is procured: Labour Secy

LAHORE:

The Labour Department is set to obtain a smart phone application for its inspectors to transfer inspection reports to a centralised database in real-time, The Express Tribune has learnt.

The decision follows the factory collapse incident at the Sundar Industrial Estate where 45 people had died and over 100 were injured. Following the incident, the provincial government had directed the Labour Department to complete physical inspection of industrial unit at all major industrial estates including the Sundar Industrial Estate, the Quaid-i-Azam Industrial Estate and the Multan Industrial Estates I and II.

Labour Secretary Ali Sarfraz Hussain said inspections would begin once the mobile application was procured. The department was expecting to receive the mobile app this week, he said.

He said the department had given its inspectors four weeks to inspect around 16,000 industrial units in the province. There are 290 labour inspectors.

The labour secretary said that the software would help improve oversight of the inspection process. Besides facilitating real-time transfer of inspection reports, the software would help officials track the location of their field staff, he said.

“The Labour Department has already developed a database of all registered industrial units in the province,” he said.

The secretary said the number of labourers registered with the department was 825,000. He said the number of industrial units had increased fourfold from 4,000 in 2001 to around 16,000. There were only 290 labour officers to carry out yearly inspections at these units, he added.

The secretary said he hoped that despite the limited human resource, the department would be able to complete the inspection of all units.

Inspection of industrial units had been suspended during the Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid led government in the 2000s. It was resumed in 2012after nearly a decade.

The secretary said that for annual inspections in the coming years, planning was underway to develop a risk-based inspection mechanism. He said under the mechanism the department would regularly inspect the units declared high-risk in previous inspections.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 24^th,  2015.