Development of Safety and Productivity Correlation Model for Tea Industries of Barak Valley, Assam

Abstract

The tea industries of Assam, India, are more than 150 years old. Though tea is an important class of industry in terms of employment and foreign exchange earning, the industry faces challenges from work place safety and declining productivity. A poor safety standard primarily originates from the belief that safety and productivity are mutually exclusive objectives, one eating away the other. But in practice they are correlated. The knowledge of exact nature of dependence of productivity with safety and health in a tea industry is therefore highly significant in the context of efficient tea production. In this paper, a quantitative relation between safety and productivity has been developed for tea industries of Barak valley, Assam. For this, safety and health in a tea industry have been modeled as function of four inputs such as occupational safety (OS), occupational health (OH), behavioral safety (BS) and competency (C). Models for the assessment of the levels of these four inputs in a scale of 0 to 10 have been proposed. Data collected from 40 nos. of CTC tea manufacturing units situated in different locations of Barak valley, Assam, India. These data were regressed using regression software Eviews 3.1 to develop the correlation model between safety and productivity. The developed correlation, which is otherwise not available in the existing literature, would definitely contribute to change the management’s erroneous mindset of treating safety as a liability to the business.