THE EXPERTISE AND THE PRACTICE OF LOSS PREVENTION IN THE INDIAN PROCESS INDUSTRY Some Pointers for the Third World TASNEEM ABBASI and S. A. ABBASI  Centre for Pollution Control & Energy Technology, Pondicherry University, Kalapet, Pondicherry, 605 014, India I n spite of great advances being made globally in the knowledge and competence pertain- ing to loss prevention in process industry, especially post-Bhopal, accidents continue to occur in all parts of the world. But such accidents generally take a greater toll of life in developing countries due to larger population densities there compared to the developed ones. The damage control machinery and the process of compensating the victims are also much less rigorous in developing countries. In this paper we present an assessment of the status of loss prevention in the Indian process industry. In many ways the Indian situation embodies the best and the worst of what exists in the third world. On one extreme is the very high quantity and quality of technical manpower and other forms of expertise available in India. On the other extreme is a lumbering bureau- cracy which continues to stoutly resist all attempts to reform it, and a public welfare system still far away from being as prompt and fair as would become the world’s largest democracy that India is. The situation in most other third world countries lies within these extremes. It is, therefore, a small wonder that the world’s worst ever process industry disaster—the Bhopal gas tragedy— and the world’s worst process industry accident of the previous decade (the Vishakhapatnam HPCL refinery disaster) have both occurred in the third world, coincidentally in India! Most of the high-casualty accidents of the current millennium have also occurred in the third world. In this paper we present an analysis of the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy and the loss prevention initiatives it had prompted. We then recount the Vishakhapatnam disaster of 1997 which reveals that most of the lessons of Bhopal seemed to have been forgotten. We also present an overview of the considerable expertise in loss prevention available in India and how this expertise is underutilized. Finally we emphasize the fact that the cultural, socio-political, demographic, and infrastructural factors prevailing in India (and indeed most of the third world) being markedly different from the ones in the developed world, further R&D on loss prevention in India should be specifically oriented towards the Indian situation. Such an R&D ought to provide continuous feedback to the government for refining the concerned legislation. Keywords: India, industrial accidents, methyl isocyanate, loss prevention, Bhopal. INTRODUCTION Some wit may call India ‘the vowel of the BRIC crown’. Of the four countries expected to advance by leaps and bounds in the years to come—Brazil, Russia and China being the other three—India’s is the most sensationally developing economy. This trend is reflected in the path taken by the Indian process industry, which is poised to grow explosively—in metaphoric sense of course—in size as well as variety. As to date, Indian chemical industry is the 12th largest in the world and third largest in Asia. It currently produces nearly 70 000 commercial products covering the gamut of process technologies. The exports of the India-made chemicals are growing at the rate of 9% per annum. These statistics put India ahead of many developed countries and all but one developing countries. India may well be termed one of the global giants in the arena of chemical process industry. But even as process industry drives a nation’s engine of progress, it also harbours in its bowels seeds of accidents which can be of such magnitude as to derail the economy of a city, a region, and even a country. In India, the growth in the chemical industry has not quite synchronized with modernization of processes and equipment. According to the Indian Chemicals Manufac- turing Associate (ICMA, 2005); the latter has proceeded  Correspondence to: Professor S. A. Abbasi, Centre for Pollution Control & Energy Technology, Pondicherry University, Kalapet, Pondicherry- 605 014, India. E-mail: prof_abbasi@vsnl.com 413 0957–5820/05/$30.00+0.00 # 2005 Institution of Chemical Engineers www.icheme.org/journals Trans IChemE, Part B, September 2005 doi: 10.1205/psep.04210 Process Safety and Environmental Protection, 83(B5): 413–420