 Hello and let's talk about the explosion at the NLC India Limited plant near Kadalur in Tamil Nadu. The boiler explosion took place on Wednesday morning in unit 5 of the plant and led to the death of 6 workers and injured at least 17. This is a second such accident in two months. Earlier in May 5 persons were killed in a similar boiler explosion in unit 6 of the plant. Now one official has been suspended and the families have blamed the management for negligence. Both unions and opposition parties have cited the privatisation of maintenance work for the disaster. The CPM in fact, in Jila in June, had demanded an inquiry by the CBI and the Central Vigilance Commission following allegations of corruption in the organisation. We talked to newsclicks Prabir Purkayashta on some of these issues. Thank you Prabir for joining us. So we've seen the blast explosion that took place on the first of July. There was another explosion quite recently two months ago almost and this has raised a lot of concerns about one general industrial safety as well during the time of the pandemic. We can come to that later. But in this specific case how do you see some of the key issues that are involved especially since the boiler units are quite old? Well as you said these boiler units are quite old. They're about 35, 30, 35 years old if not older and obviously they need periodic checkups, maintenance you know so that they are still not prone to failures. So that's an obvious issue but you know there are two things I think which are very important here. One is of course it's happening in the times of pandemic. We do not know to what extent the normal practices are being at the moment sacrificed in order to reduce the number of people coming in and if we postpone some of these things critical and for the safety of the plant of course a lot of the maintenance work is critical then of course it can impinge on safety. That's one part of it and we have had a number of industrial accidents take place. Of course Tutikori is the other example that plants were shut down and restarted with not adequate care and we had explosions and other consequences there. So one of it is during COVID times do we really know how to maintain equipment safely and that's an unknown because it really is something that each plant has to take care of itself. It's something that there can be no general guidelines but obviously one thing you cannot sacrifice is safety and currently we are in a very good situation on the electricity front because obviously the demand is much lower and because the demand is much lower your reservoirs are full. You really don't have a shortage of electricity on the grid and you can very easily shut down plants and take longer time to come up if that is a problem. So that's the COVID general situation that I will talk about. The other is that why do boiler explosions take place? Boiler explosions are unusual. They normally should not take place if your maintenance requirements are being met A and B your control systems are working because your first line of safety is that the controls have to kick in and any condition which shows that there is impending boiler explosion likely to occur because there are certain conditions which are taking place within the boiler then of course you have to trim the food and that's how you take out any chance of an explosion. In this particular case when you were trying to restart the boiler that's when the explosion seems to have occurred particularly the last one that we are talking about and that's very much a part of probably and I'm going to fly blind over here but given the experience that we have had looking at plants, plant failures earlier as you know I was a control system engineer for a long time basically involved in design of boilers of control systems and of course the boiler was a key element of that. So I would say that the probable reason is that certain safety systems would also have been bypassed during starting of the boiler and thinking that it won't matter and it normally it may not matter but one time it does you have an explosion and that's what we saw also on the NTPC boiler explosion which took place sometime back and there was a plan to inaugurate it quickly and they were trying to hurry up the things and the bypass the boiler protection it exploded. So to me it seems that in this particular case the hurry to restart the boiler for some reason which I'm not clear because there should have been no pressure for this that seems to have led to certain short shortcut steps to be that were being taken and that has led to the explosion and there's very unhappy loss of life and very large number of engineers that have taken place and boiler explosions really kill people because the fire coming out hot gases coming out obviously have enormous potential to damage people's basically kill them as well those who are close. So looking at it that it happened at 32 meters that's what the statement is it happened at one of the elevations and obviously there was some failure of the flame protection system not properly tripping the fuel whatever it is and we have the consequent explosion. I would say that this level of competence that you were to such incidents within such a short period of time really calls for very strict action to see that you do a complete safety audit of all the units over here the practices that have been followed and then take you know then only open them at the moment you don't have to you can take the units out and do a complete safety audit and then only put them back two units out of six seven that are there in this stage I think the this station thermal power station two in Naivelli has seven two hundred and ten megawatt units you can take all of them out put them to a safety audit before you restart I think it needs much more serious action by the NLC authorities that we have seen till now and this is central government undertake it's not under the state though it is located within the state it's really not under the state and NLC is one of the really what they call the Navaratna kind of companies so it is one of the key jewels and crown jewels in the public sector they take is particularly in the power sector it is a very illustrious past record so given that I think that time has come to take with the second accident that we have seen time has come to take some stringent action and at least the minimum that should be done is a complete safety audit of the plant from outsiders and the practice that has been there in the plant because from what we read in the papers the unions of others have also raised the issue of maintenance being not being done regularly shortcuts being taken basic safety measures not being taken all of these are have been talked about by the workers so I think given that I think the need for a stringent safety audit I think the past chairman of it of CE a central exit authority Bakshi Mr. Bakshi was supposed to head a committee which was supposed to look into the earlier explosion I think the time has come for us to take at least think about a much larger inquiry not just about the explosion but running up the plant itself two successive boiler explosions are very very unusual and look seem to indicate a deeper malaise in the plant. The other question from you is regarding the age of the plants itself is this something like we've talked about it's about 35 years old is it something are these plants right now still in a condition that can be maintained and work and continue for a while or is there a need to maybe look at a much larger solution? You know we have had plants in NTPC for instance the earliest plants which have been operational now for almost 40 years the Singhwali plant for example so I do not think age of the plant is particularly the issue because you can always take them down refurbish them and start them again so there are various ways to estimate the life of the plant and then take corrective action right so I don't think that's really the issue you can essentially run plants for a long time provided you take the necessary measures and if you find there is a problem in a certain area then you refurbish that so that's a well-known way of dealing with aging plants so this is to be not the reason and if you take these plants there there are number of plants in the statelix to as well as in NTPC which are of the same vintage 210 megawatt units of VHL are the mainstay of Indian past sector okay particularly the earlier vintage plants and later on the 500 megawatt unit of course VHL is now under attack of different kinds because of privatization huge number of Chinese units came in as well as units from other places but essentially VHL was the main supplier for a very long time into the Indian past sector and these vintage of plants are there all over the country so I wouldn't think 30-35 years is the reason for this particular blast I would say it is something that is much more the responsibility of the plant and its personnel and then the larger sense is the responsibility of the NLC leadership right and finally maybe you already talked about of course the situation of industrial accidents industrial maintenance during COVID itself and you also of course seen the recent incident in Vizag where there was the leak that led to people again not people dying so is there also a need specifically for a more centralized set of guidelines to across industries specifically on this context you know how to run hazardous equipment hazardous units is quite known to the people who install and run such units so the the Vizag issue that you are talking about and the earlier with the Tutikori issue as well all these are issues where people who run hazardous units should be able to do the proper checks before the equipment is restarted so it really shows lack of full awareness of what has to be done and the lack of technically equipped human power manpower to be there in the spot who knows these things so maybe you want to start it in a hurry maybe you don't want to call the people who really know these things and you want to avoid them because of travel for other reasons some of these plants were set up by people from abroad the Korea South Korea was one of the plant owners so it is possible that you make mistakes because you haven't called the right people that's possible but I do not think it's a central responsibility or a regulatory responsibility and go and do safety audits for each and every plant yes we do it for boiler there is a boiler inspectorate which goes and at the moment they seem to know no less about the boilers than the plant people themselves so it has become more a formality for the boiler inspectorate to come in and do an inspection do we need a strong regulatory agency for boilers yes I think the boiler inspectorate does need to be strengthened can you do it for every hazardous plant to my understanding we have we can only do it in the limited sense because whatever safety audits we carry out we really do not know the innards of a lot of these hazardous plants boilers are still much more shall we say well known they're well known beasts we know what they are we know their designs and much more is available in the public domain on that but that's not true for the chemical industry because a lot of them are really proprietary procedures so we don't even know what is what actually the risks are as you found out in the Bhopal gas disaster that what only all the things that were there in that plant I doubt very much at that time that India had the ability to know the possible dangers from this equipment and the chemicals used and I think that would still be the case in a large number of chemical industrial plants but at the level of boilers yes regulation certainly needs to be strengthened but in this particular case I think the first blame the first responsibility is of the plant authorities it's only secondarily that you can talk about the boiler inspectorate and others who should have also been alert about the possibilities and particularly after one explosion thank you so much for talking to us that's all we have time for today we'll be back on monday with major news developments from the country until then keep watching news click