Dear friends and supporters of Safe in India
We are pleased to announce the opening of our second Worker Assistance Centre in Faridabad on 26th January 2021. The Centre will assist injured workers, mainly in the auto-sector, with their ESIC healthcare and compensations - the same as our Manesar Centre. Meena Devi, an injured worker's wife, cut the ribbon.
We had been visiting Faridabad for several months now to see if it too has similar patterns of injuries in the auto-components manufacturing factories as Gurgaon, where we have been active for 4 years now, and the less than desirable level of services from ESIC. During these occasional visits in 2020, we met hundreds of injured workers and assisted 150+ of them. We found that the crush injuries to hands and fingers were even worse than Gurgaon - probably because Faridabad is an older auto-sector hub than Gurgaon and may have even worse safety practices. It became clear that the worker community needs support and guidance, and we too needed to better understand the auto-sector supply chain in Faridabad.
The branch-launch included awards to our 4 Shramik Saathis: Manmohan Bajpeyi, Pawan Shah, Vishwadeepak and Umesh Kumar, who along with our own staff members, were instrumental in distribution of 450,000+ food rations and 25,000+ masks to migrant worker and daily wager communities in the relatively remote villages around Manesar, during Covid19 lock-down. We are grateful to them for their ongoing support and outreach in the worker community.
Sadly, after only two months of branch-opening, we have already met (and assisted) another c.50 injured workers in Jan and Feb. Based on what we have seen until now and our interactions with ESIC doctors, the number of such crush-injuries in Faridabad are more than a thousand a year.
We have our work cut out and will keep you updated. Please spread the word to your worker, factory, NGO, etc contacts in Faridabad; they can contact us at team@safeinindia.org for any clarifications. Our Faridabad address is here:
सेफ इन इंडिया फाउडेशन Safe in India Foundation
मकान न:- 3A/146-147, निकट DAV कालेज House no 3A/146-147, Near DAV College
NIT-3 फरीदाबाद NIT-3 Faridabad
Mobile: 9717215194 Mobile: 9717215194 The Centre is run by Praveen Rawat, under guidance of Masab Shamsi, Amitesh Kumar, and ably supported by Jitendra; they share their time between the Manesar and Faridabad office. We need to resource this Centre better soon and are recruiting for it.
To help us help these workers, please donate here. Your donations have helped us help more than 2,600 injured workers with healthcare and compensations of more than Rs 20 crore value:
Our immediate next steps now are to stabilise this new Centre, to launch our report on the worker-safety policies for the suppliers of top 10 auto-brands in India, continue working intensively with ESIC to make the Covid19 unemployment scheme successful, and follow up on safety related actions agreed in the much-awaited first joint meeting in Gurgaon, Haryana between ISH (Industrial Safety and Health), Maruti, Hero and Honda. More on that in the next blog.
With gratitude
team@safeinindia.org
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