CHAIRMAN’S MESSAGE
Dear Stakeholders,
For decades, Hindustan Zinc has been synonymous with creating value for all its stakeholders. Our theme this year, ‘Caring A to Z’, is our core intent of growth –all encompassing, and spans all areas of operation.
This is my first message as Chairman of Hindustan Zinc and I feel honoured to take on the chairmanship of a company with world class assets and practices and is recognised amongst the global best. We are in the process of developing quality systems using high end technologies for future growth and fostering partnerships for maximizing the benefits for the organisation, as well as for the communities around.
HZL has been working towards developing green belts, creating safe jobs and making operations more sustainable. Our move from open cast to underground mines and mine digitisation have helped develop intelligent mines that are safe, smart, connected and analytical. Technology has created safer working environment, and helped the communities around – truly reinforcing our intent of ‘caring A to Z’.
With the world's largest Zinc Mine (by volume) in Rampura Agucha, Hindustan Zinc is today India’s largest and world’s second largest zinc-lead miner. Hindustan Zinc is also the 9th largest Silver producer globally and is aiming to produce 1000 tonnes of Silver in the next 3-4 years. This will position Hindustan Zinc in the top 5 global Silver producers. The Company’s silver refinery at Pantnagar is recognized by London Bullion Market Association for its quality and the Company is among LBMA’s Silver Good Delivery List.
This global growth has been possible with the Company’s unwavering focus on sustainability. HZL has a strong focus on conservation of water and energy. All the plants operate on zero-effluent discharge and we are moving steadily to Zero waste to landfill.
‘Zero Harm’ is our un-relenting objective. We believe that every incident is avoidable and acknowledge with deep regret, the tragic seven fatalities this year. We have strengthened our resolve to provide safe and secure workplaces to our employees through a number of innovative measures introduced this year.
To have more focus on site Health & Safety issues, compliance and performance, we initiated Zone HSE Coach programme where all ExCo members regularly visit sites and guide site teams. Formation of first-of-its-kind Safety Innovation Cell this year is an important step to drive safety through adoption of technology, innovation, analytics and benchmarking to bring best in class Safety Practices. In addition to HZL’s existing framework of First Party Safety Audit and External Audits, we have also developed procedures for Second Party Audits. The investment in technology, innovation and sophisticated machines reinstate our safety resolve.
To be an employer of choice, HZL provides right learning and development opportunities to all employees across functions and levels. Keeping our promise of an improvement-oriented work culture, this year, we introduced Hexa, a Personal data assistant aimed at reducing manual work and visualizing analytics that will enable our teams in better decision-making.
This year, we have extensively revamped our mining communities. 14 mining communities represent the complete spectrum of Mine to Mill and emphasize on safety, operational excellence, technology & innovation and skill enhancement. The communities help us in implementation of best practices across locations while pushing towards standardisation.
Project ‘Sarathi’ is helping in achieving faster turn around times for vehicles and we are showing a continuous improvement in logistics excellence. These examples have helped us move one step ahead in our ambition of getting end-to-end visibility in logistics, while ensuring essential compliance standards and safety measures.
The objective of all our community programmes is to build a life of dignity for the communities around. The Company has always had strong focus on education, training of rural youth for gainful employment, child care, rural women empowerment, agriculture & livestock development, to name a few. During the year, we put in place MEAL (monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning) systems to improve transparency in CSR projects – a step forward in strengthening governance. Our total investment in CSR activities has increased by 42%, to ` 130 Crore for the year, impacting 500,000 beneficiaries.
I would like make a special mention of Udaipur’s first‘ Sewage Treatment Plant (STP)’ under Public-Private-Partnership model that Hindustan Zinc has set-up. Initially this STP had the capacity to treat 20 million litres of sewage per day which was expanded to 45 million litres of sewage treatment per day and another 15 MLD is under execution. With the expanded capacity, the Company expects to treat maximum of Udaipur’s domestic sewage and this will help us in reducing our dependencies on fresh water at our Rajpura Dariba complex.
This year we have also re-visited our materiality issues and undertaken a materiality mapping exercise to re-examine issues that are important, both to the Company as well as to all its stakeholders.
I look forward to contributing to HZL’s growth and want to continue to find new and innovative ways to lead and support initiatives that Hindustan Zinc has helped fulfil – in terms of growth, safety of our people and needs of our communities. The opportunity to help the company grow through an agenda of ‘all-encompassing caring’ is one that I am greatly looking forward to.
Warm regards
Kiran Agarwal