ahmedabad the world health organization who puts the estimate of occupational health on global gdp at 34 annually in a country like india where about 9092 of the workforce is in informal sector the figure could be higher opined experts who gathered at indian institute of public health gandhinagar iiphg as part of an international workshop on occupational and environmental healthprof dileep mavalankar director iiphg said that motive of the workshop was to understand global best practices and how to implement it in indian context dr shyam pingle senior occupational health specialist from iiphg said that the initiative to improve occupational health should start from the general physician levelstudies show that the mbbs students learn about occupational health for about 20 hours in their entire course data collection is a major issue while assessing the impact of a persons occupation on hisher health and cause of death he saidprof gert van der laan from the netherlands said that regulations and implementations are stricter in several european nations when it was found that pesticides were causing illness among the dutch farmers rules about procurement and use of pesticides were introduced and the chemicals were made expensive the move brought desired results he saidin italy the occupational healthcare professionals have powers of an enforcement officer that can visit the industrial areas and can also take legal action data collection is also stringent that can point towards major hazardous factors in time said prof claudio colosio university of milan italyover 50 occupational and industry health experts from gujarat and other parts of india participated in the workshop some of the suggestions that came out of the discussion included better data collection at industry cluster level about potential hazards better monitoring of unorganized production sector and timely health checkups for workers at major clusters in gujarat such as alang morbi and ankleshwar