Prevalence of Low Back Injury (lbi) Risk Due to Manual Lifting Tasks among Small Scale Casting Industry Workers

Present study is focused to analyze the association between the low back injury risk and work factors in few small scale casting firms of Northern India. Lifting Index (LI) was used as a decisive factor to ascertain the risk level of low back injury. Four different jobs performed by 40 different workers of three small scale casting units were investigated with the help of NIOSH lifting equation. The results revealed that 85% of the workers were performing under different levels of LBI risk as their LI > 1, whereas only the rest of 15% workers were found safe with Lifting Index ≤ 1. Out of 85% workers, 38.23% were under low risk, 32.35% of workers were under medium risk and 29.41% of the workers were under high risk. The study also revealed that some of the variables of the equation like; frequency of lift, horizontal and vertical distances were found very critical as their corresponding multipliers were significantly higher. Since the frequency of lifts was much higher, the workers were bound to perform their tasks at a very fast pace. This leads to further investigation on rationality of daily production targets and standard time using work measurement techniques. Further Chi Square ‘χ2’ analysis was performed to check the dependability of low back pain on various demographic and operational parameters. The analysis revealed that Lifting Index was found dependent on type of task performed by the workers, although, the low back pain was found independent of age, weight, height, body-mass index. The study concluded that there is a need to redesign the lifting tasks by optimizing the equation variables like; frequency of lift, horizontal and vertical distance.