A Safety Audit in an industrial unit mainly aims to:

Question

A Safety Audit in an industrial unit mainly aims to:

1. A. Assess only the aesthetic appearance of the plant
2. B. Identify unsafe practices, hazards, and effectiveness of safety management systems (Correct answer)
3. C. Replace legal clearance processes
4. D. Measure only noise levels in the office

Correct Answer

Option B — Identify unsafe practices, hazards, and effectiveness of safety management systems

Detailed Solution & Explanation

The correct answer is Identify unsafe practices, hazards, and effectiveness of safety management systems.

Key Points

• A Safety Audit examines the workplace for unsafe conditions and unsafe acts, and assesses whether the safety management system actually controls them.
• Its scope covers hazard identification, adequacy of guards and interlocks, permit-to-work systems, personal protective equipment, training, emergency preparedness and accident investigation.
• The other options trivialise it — aesthetic appearance, office noise — or wrongly suggest it substitutes for statutory clearance, which it never does.

Additional Information

• The distinction from an environmental audit is one of whom the harm falls on: a safety audit protects people inside the plant, an environmental audit protects the environment and the community outside. In practice the two are often conducted together as an HSE audit.
• In India, safety audits for hazardous factories draw on IS 14489, the Indian Standard code of practice on occupational safety and health audit.
• The legal backdrop is the Factories Act, 1948, particularly the Chapter IV-A provisions on hazardous processes inserted after Bhopal, and the Manufacture, Storage and Import of Hazardous Chemical Rules, 1989.
• A good audit reports not only findings but root causes, since recurring unsafe acts almost always trace to a system failure rather than individual carelessness.