At L&T we have always been committed to the health and safety of employees; we were one of the earliest to start reporting Safety data in our Sustainability Reports. Today, new age technologies are ushering in a new dimension of safety at our work sites.
Our ultimate digital vision is of the ‘connected workman’ who, with ‘wearables’ can be ‘sensed’, which can play a vital role in ensuring his safety.
Good safety begins with awareness and training and we are using innovative digital technologies to impart such training to our workmen.
L&T has developed films using Immersive Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality to demonstrate safety practices covering multiple scenarios like working at heights, material handling, heavy vehicle management, working at excavation sites, working with HT lines, safety barricading, work permits and working in a marine environment. These films, translated into several Indian languages, help create a vivid immersive experience and imprint the rules of safety firmly in the minds of workmen.
Another important safety-related digital initiative has been the introduction of bar codes to the full body harnesses, which not only account for each life-saving device but also makes its periodic inspection certain and more efficient.
To ensure good compliance with safety processes, the Safety App in use at all our project sites has digitized all the safety processes like safe to start, pre-start inspections, near miss and incident reporting and rectification. This Safety App has been deployed at scale and is used by over 15000 site staff. The data from this app enables online real-time reviews of safety, and analytics on this data enable trends and patterns to be identified for effective rectification actions and improvements.
At several specific sites, RFID and BLE technologies are being used to identify workmen to their assigned task locations and alert against straying into hazardous areas. A comprehensive database that records the skills certifications and expertise of the workmen is being built to enable deployment of the right resources for the right jobs and improve safety and productivity.
Our ultimate digital vision is of the ‘connected workman’ who, with ‘wearables’ can be ‘sensed’, which can play a vital role in ensuring his safety. Sensors and beacons on the workmen can detect altitude, temperature and other environmental conditions and monitor vitals like heartbeat, pulse rate, blood pressure and fatigue. Using various AI models and methods can generate suitable alerts in real-time to prevent incidents. Work in this area is at an experimental stage as we strive to find the best solutions in the near future.
Using digital technologies, we are evolving proactive and planned programmes for safety that, along with environment and health, form the crux of our EHS system - an integral function of the organization.
Read more about L&T’s EHS focused initiatives and their results in our Integrated Report