Surat Textile Mills Found Violating Fire Safety Norms

Trade & Policy

Surat Textile Mills Found Violating Fire Safety Norms

The Surat Textile units are not complying with fire safety norms discovered the local civic body’s survey. The survey was conducted by fire and emergency services of Surat Municipal Corporation (SMC). According to the findings of the survey at Pandesara GIDC, in all there were 145 textile units and none of them had any fire safety provision.

The civic body officials disclosed that nearly 50% of the units in the locality were surveyed and they had all drawn a nil in fire safety norms. In a short while fire safety notices will be issued to all these mills and they will be required to comply with safety norms.

As per statistics furnished by the Industry sources, there are approximately 350 textile mills located in the area and they employ around 3 lakh workers with a monthly corpus of nearly INR 1800 crore.

A fire safety officer pointed out that the textile units have an annual turnover of INR 21,000 crore and are in a sound position to take care of fire safety norms bearing their own expenses. Their failure to do so endangers the lives of lakhs of workers. The main problem is weak structures and abysmal lack of fire safety equipment.

Many of these mills are run under tin sheds with concrete walls and temporary supports. Their finished goods and raw materials are kept in semi-open sheds. This causes a grave fire disaster hazard.