As industrial sickness is an umbrella term applied to various things associated with industry that make people ill and cause them to miss work. The solutions will have to be tailored to the specific industry, and only in that way can any real effect be made on improving the health and productivity of the industrial workforce.
The key is an aggresive work-up on the health issues for a given segment of the industrial workforce, and usually broken down by type of work (which makes sense). Even as coal miners face overpowering respiratory threats, and foundry and mill workers have to confront major physical threats from large (heavy) quantities of extremely hot materials, each facet of industrial production has its hot-button health issues. The industrial health managers need training and experience identifying and remediating conditions that present major health threats to their respective workforces.
Then they can train the rest of management and can teach the workers themselves about the best way to carry out their jobs with minimum threats to their health The ill-effects of sickness in industrial companies such as loss of production, loss of employment, losee of revenue to the Central and State Governments and locking up of investible funds and Financial Institutions are of serious concern to the society at large.
It is, therefore, generally recognised that in order to fully utilise the productive industrial assets, afford maximum protection to employment and optimise the use of funds of the Banks and Financial Institutions, it would be imperative to revive and rehabilitate the potential viable sick industrial companies as quickly as possible. As a matter of fact, Parliament enacted the Sick Industrial Companies (provisions) Act, 1985 for this purpose. Has it reduced sickness? Unfortunately not. With the industrial sickness increasing day by day, it has become a burning national problem.
Data on sick industrial units assisted by Banks in the country, is compiled by Reserve Bank of India. According to the RBI report, numbers of causes, both internal and external, often operating in combination have been responsible for industrial sickness. The main causes include deficiencies in planning, Management, marketing etc. The RBI report mentions change in Government policy as one of the external factors. Interestingly, as per RBI data only, 3% of the causes for industrial sickness is attributable to labour unrest
