Amara Raja Group begins partial operations, details SOP to ensure safety

L-R: Dr. N Chandra Babu, group medical officer, Amara Raja Group; G Vijaya Naidu, president – Group Quality, Health, Safety & Environment; Dr. Ramadevi Gourineni, MD, Amara Raja Infra and Amara Hospital, and G Jagan Mohan, VP and head operations, Amara Raja Batteries.

Andhra Pradesh-headquartered Amara Raja Group today begin partial commenced manufacturing operations post the notifications issued by the Union government and Andhra Pradesh government that paved partial relaxations from April 20. The Group says it has chalked out an action plan for running its partial operations with a detailed standard operating procedure (SOP) ensuring social distancing, hygiene and people safety.

Amara Raja says the SOP emphasises on five critical aspects – Social distancing, Screening & Monitoring, Disinfection & Sanitisation, Containment plan & Prevention and Awareness.

It says that it is looking forward to a new normal, and a new way of life that calls for radical behavioural changes on all aspects, including usage of transport, cafeteria, amenities, common areas, and inside the plant, offices and field locations.

Sharing details about partial recommencement of operations, Jay Galla, vice-chairman, Amara Raja Group said, “Post the notification issued by the government allowing partial operation, our teams have collaborated and put together a robust system in place to commence our operations and at the same time safeguarding the health and well-being of our employees. Our SOP details out the New Way of Life aspects like attitudes and behaviour at workplace in the way we work, the way we use facilities, the guidelines we need to follow right from starting from home to work and back. Ever since the start of this crisis, we have been implementing varied initiatives to combat the contagion at the institutional, local, state and national level to deal with the pandemic.”

The company says all its businesses are getting into partial operations in a phased manner adhering to all the necessary health and safety guidelines issued by the central and state governments and ensuring complete compliance of the SOPs.

In fact, the company says that even before Covi-19 was declared a pandemic, the Amara Raja Group constituted a Group Corporate Taskforce for the prevention of Covid-19. The taskforce includes senior leadership and medical professionals who are aimed to evaluate the entire operating environment, to assess the operating guidelines released by central and state governments, to formulate and execute the action plan devised against the pandemic and to come up with more sustainable strategies for the resumption of work post Covid-19.

Reconstituting the existing Group Corporate Taskforce for prevention of COVID-19, the group further strengthened its working by adding four core taskforce teams as follows – Health Safety and People, Business Continuity, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), and Covid-19 Impact and Data Analysis.  These taskforce teams comprising leaders across the group are working collaboratively in combating the crisis.

The growth committee of the group which comprises of the chairman, vice-chairman and the senior leadership, alongside are having daily video meetings to discuss the various aspects of people and business. The SOP document advises all the people to install and use the government of India launched  ‘Arogya Setu App’.

In addition, the Group has enabled the digital people platform called ‘WE@AR’ to communicate and engage with all its 16,000-plus employees. As soon as the lock down was announced, the people platform has been enabled with geo-tagging, which further helps the group to know the location of each of its people and offer them support in case of any urgency. The group is also working towards developing a customised self-screening tool which will help employees understand their health readiness to work.

The Amara Raja Group has also set up shelter camps for migrant workers on its Karakambadi, Petamitta, ARGC and Digivamagam facility centres, which are regularly monitoring the health of over 800 migrant workers and their families while providing them with daily essentials.  Amara Raja earlier announced several measures for the communities at large including that of Rs 6 crore donation to the chief ministers relief fund of which Rs 5 crore to AP CM Relief Fund and Rs 1 crore to the Telangana CM Relief fund. This included a day salary contribution from all employees in the Group.