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EDITOR: NAGARAJA.M.R ....
VOL.22 .. .ISSUE...54……05/07/2026
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Industrial accidents claim the lives of more than 6,000 workers in India every year, averaging nearly three deaths daily. With the recent labour codes mandating safety committees at workplaces employing over 500 workers, the question remains whether the country will be able to improve industrial safety and worker representation.
Talking to The Tribune, Sudip Dutta, president, Centre of Indian Trade Unions, claimed only 10 per cent of actual industrial accident deaths were reported in the country, while the real figure exceeded worker deaths annually.
“With the government now codifying labour rules, the real question is implementation and compliance. The need of the hour is not better rules but solid execution.
The Centre has coined the term ‘inspector-cum-facilitators’ in the codes, wherein a labour inspector has to seek permission from the labour department before taking any action. In a way, the codes have rendered the entire department non-functional,” he said.
Dutta noted that instead of surprise inspections by government departments, the new codes provided that self-declaration by employers would suffice.
“The constitution of safety committees is a welcome step, but if the government puts a ceiling of 500-plus workers, nearly 76 per cent of factories will automatically move outside the purview of the labour codes. In fact, around 90 per cent of workers within the organised sector will be exempted because they do not employ 500 workers,” he added.
Labour expert BV Raghavendra said the government should also take into consideration inadequate infrastructure and the overuse of machinery beyond capacity, which often led to fatal accidents.
“A majority of industrial accidents occur due to regulatory gaps and inadequate safety protocols and compliance. If we look at recent boiler explosion cases, usually their certification remains valid for up to a year even though their condition varies daily and requires regular monitoring,” he said.
“It is high time industrial safety is viewed as a worker’s fundamental right. It is tragic that Indian authorities only recently removed nearly 337 tonnes of toxic waste from the defunct Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, marking a significant, though partial, cleanup effort 40 years after the 1984 gas disaster,” he added.
Dutta also said the provision to increase working hours under the new rules could further raise the risk of industrial accidents. “Extension of working hours means fatigue will set in and concentration will decline, increasing the possibility of accidents,” he said.
Another CITU member Amarjeet Kaur questioned how the government planned to ensure the efficient functioning of safety committees when even compliance with minimum wages remained weak in the country.
“A recent SBI report based on the latest Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) 2025 data found massive gaps in how different regions handle wage regulation. It said nearly one-fourth of India’s casual workforce received pay below the statutory minimum wage. How can the Labour Ministry enforce the labour codes? The new rules are only meant to look good on paper,” she said.
Dutta also argued that India had not yet framed any rules or guidelines for artificial intelligence-aided production.
“With robots being increasingly used in production, India is yet to formulate clear guidelines in this domain. For instance, if a worker is working between two robots and a wrong command or technical snag leads to an accident causing death, what would that be called? A technical fault?” he asked.
The CITU president also urged the government to take into account the poor conditions in which workers in small factories operated. He said the polluted air they breathe and the intense noise they endure were rarely treated as industrial hazards.
“Contemporary times have brought new forms of industrial diseases into focus. Those working in the IT sector are often diagnosed with diabetes and hypertension due to chronic stress. An employee returning home while driving under intense pressure, or falling asleep at the wheel and meeting with an accident, reflects inhuman working conditions. It is time the authorities took a holistic view of the issue,” he added.
A Labour Ministry official said while the Central rules under the labour codes had been finalised, states were still in the process of aligning their own rules, making it essential to monitor local amendments.
Foreseeable accidents: On the recent industrial accidents in India
Industrial mishaps are due to accumulated organisational weaknesses
Despite there having been a streak of industrial accidents in India of late, the notion that they are isolated and incidental persists. Within days of each other, four workers were killed in a ‘mishap’ in a septic tank in Surat while nine workers were killed by an explosion at a steel plant in Visakhapatnam.
They appear to be different circumstances: one involved workers entering a confined space and succumbing to toxic gases; the other involved 150 tonnes of molten steel and a violent blast. Yet, industry has known of these risks and had developed preventive measures decades ago.
In the Surat incident, four workers entered the tank and were overcome by toxic fumes. The circumstances resemble a well-known pattern in fatalities in confined spaces, where the first victims are often followed by would-be rescuers who enter without protection. There have been deaths in similar circumstances in Surat’s industrial sector in recent years.
The working area must be mechanically ventilated and have rescue personnel on standby while the workers must have breathing apparatuses, harnesses and retrieval lines, and clear lines of communication. Unprotected entry must be strictly prohibited. Septic tank deaths and deaths due to manual scavenging are in fact rarely accidents in the sense of unforeseeable events, but failures of basic safety management, and the recurrence of such incidents speaks to the persistence of that failure.
Likewise, while steelmaking is intrinsically more dangerous because it combines extreme temperatures, pressurised gases, heavy equipment, and enormous stores of heat energy, industry still knows the hazards it poses, and further that even relatively small process failures can result in multiple casualties.
Both incidents, and the patterns they extend, are reminders of persistent safety failures in many parts of Indian industry. In Visakhapatnam, trade unions and former employees have alleged that the plant had reduced staffing, heavier workloads, ageing equipment, deferred maintenance, and an increasing dependence on contractual labour.
Some also linked these trends to the difficulties the plant faced following the Centre’s divestment plans and the resulting constraints on investments. However true any of these factors are, they confirm that a major industrial accident is almost always due to the accumulation of organisational weaknesses.
In fact, contract labour is central to understanding both incidents. Occupational safety research has consistently found that contracted workers face higher risks because they may receive less training and operate within systems with fragmented accountability.
The incidents have also occurred during the gradual and uneven implementation of India’s new occupational safety framework — and highlight the invisible fact that the country’s industries remain anchored by old problems of manpower shortage, caste- and class-based exposure to hazardous labour, and a ‘cost over safety’ mindset in financially stressed units.
Safety Rules Routinely Flouted In India’s Factories
Indian factories routinely flout occupational health and safety rules, even as inspections remain scant, and overworked, underpaid workers operate faulty machinery leading to accidents and injuries, many of which are not counted in official statistics, a new report shows.
For instance, India’s labour rules mandate a 48-hour limit per week for factory workers, but this limit is routinely ignored. Safe In India Foundation (SII), a Manesar-based organisation focused on automobile workers' safety, has assisted over 11,000 workers since 2016 in accessing Employees' State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) entitlements like medical support and pension.
The Occupational Safety & Health and Working Conditions (Central) Rules, 2025 allow factories to operate for 12 hours a day without overtime, provided that they follow a four-day work week such that the 48-hour limit is maintained.
However, 72% injured workers said they work more than 60 hours a week, while 24% work 48 to 60 hours. Further, many workers reported working frequent 24-hour shifts, according to Crushed 2026, SII’s eighth annual report on workplace injuries.
Two in five injured workers were aware of machine malfunctions, and 84% had reported these to their supervisors, but they were ignored, SII found. Nearly nine in 10 workers said that machines were inspected only after an accident or before a scheduled audit, in violation of daily checks as required.
Factories are required to maintain records on health and safety, but anecdotally, SII found that “brand new accident registers with only the current case written are kept, that too only before the audits”.
"Both government and OEM/buyer inspectors are essentially not reaching these factories, and when they do, they don't talk to the workers, which matches what more than 11,000 injured workers have told us over the years," said Dhanraj Balakrishna, senior manager, advocacy at SII.
About a fifth of workers and sixth of helpers who were assisted by SII after an injury said they did not receive a minimum wage.
Only 5% received an appointment letter, about half do not receive salary slips, and most of those who do receive them report errors such as underreporting of working hours and lower wages for overtime.
ESIC applies to factories and other establishments like road transport, hotels, restaurants etc where 10 or more persons are employed. Employees drawing wages up to Rs 21,000 a month, are entitled to social security cover under the ESI Act.
Immediately after an accident, workers fight an uphill battle to avail their medical entitlements under the ESIC, which helps access healthcare entitlement during sickness, maternity, disablement and death due to employment injury and to provide medical care to insured persons and their families.
Three in five injured workers received their ESIC e-Pehchaan card only after their accident.
The proportion was higher in Maharashtra, where 79% of injured workers received the card after the accident, compared with 58% in Haryana.
“[The] Automobile industry in India has a wide and deep supply chain. The production model seeks low and cheap costs including labour,” labour economist Shyam Sundar had told us in July 2024. “As we go down the supply chain, most regulations are weak.”
Injuries highest in a decade
In 2025 alone, the organisation assisted 2,514 workers across India’s factories—more than two-thirds of them in the auto supply chain. “SII posits that given its limited outreach nationally, many more thousands of workers continue to be injured in the automotive sector every year across the country,” the report states.
These data are based on workers assisted at SII’s Manesar, Faridabad and Gurugram centres in Haryana, and Mohan Nagar and Chakan in Maharashtra.
Last year, 72% of worker injuries in the automobile supply chain factories were ‘crush injuries’, which resulted in a loss of about two fingers, on average. Most of these were on the power press machine, used in the automobile industry for cutting and shaping metal which reduces labour and time to produce material.
The typical worker who sustains a crush injury tends to be non-permanent, migrant workers, who are paid less and have limited formal education or training.
In 2024, IndiaSpend reported the story of Basanti and Shyamvati, both in their 30s who moved from Rajasthan to Faridabad.
They started off as helpers in automobile component manufacturing units in Faridabad, and went on to become power press operators. Neither was provided training for the work, having been forced to pick up the skills on the job. Both of them needed the extra money, and both had their hands crushed in accidents on the job at their units. Both of them were struggling to access medical entitlements, and neither was able to find work, we had reported.
Women are more disadvantaged due to gender wage disparity, illiteracy and lack of proper training to operate power presses, lack of job opportunities post accidents, family pressure, and difficulty in accessing legally entitled post-accident support, our reporting found.
In Haryana, 85% of injured workers were migrants, mainly from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. In Maharashtra, 63% were migrants, including workers from Marathwada as well as other states.
About 21% of injured workers operating machines had no formal education or had studied only up to grade X. Young workers accounted for a large share of injuries: Workers below the age of 30 accounted for 41% of injured workers in Haryana and 48% in Maharashtra.
Injuries across the supply chains
Nearly 98% of the 9,000-odd injured workers assisted since 2019 worked in the supply chain of India’s top six automobile brands—Maruti Suzuki, Honda, Hero, Tata Motors, Mahindra and Bajaj, the report found. In 2025, these six brands accounted for 1,350 of the 1,729 injured workers (78%) assisted by SII in the sector.
In Haryana, injuries in the supply chains of Maruti, Honda and Hero peaked in 2022 and have since declined. But in Maharashtra, injuries rose in factories supplying to Tata Motors, Mahindra and Bajaj.
Between 2018 and 2025, a single factory in Faridabad saw 76 workers with life-altering injuries, which SII says “represent a continuous operational reality where severe, irreversible injuries have become a predictable outcome of the manufacturing process”. This is despite the SII’s repeated flagging of the establishment to the government and the automobile brands that source from it.
Further, 93% of injury cases in 2025 involved power press machines with no safety sensors. "Where sensors do exist, they're often removed so the machine runs faster, and when workers raise the alarm, they're ignored," said Siddharth Raina, senior manager, research and advocacy at SII. "For a factory, the sensor is a small cost, for the worker, the cost is permanent, on average, two fingers lost."
Most workers received no formal training: 37% of injured workers said they learned to operate machines while working on them. Helpers accounted for 15% of machine injuries, despite machine operation being classified as a skilled role.
A 2026 review found that contractual and temporary workers faced a higher risk of non-fatal occupational injuries than permanent workers. The review suggested that temporary workers may be assigned more hazardous tasks or receive less safety training than permanent employees.
Official data capture few incidents
The Directorate General Factory Advice Service and Labour Institutes (DGFASLI) is the technical arm of the labour ministry which deals with matters related to Occupational Safety and Health in factories and dock works of major ports. DGFASLI collects statistics from state chief inspectors of factories and directors of industrial safety and health. These data represent only registered factories, although about 90% of workers in India are employed in the informal sector, IndiaSpend reported in January 2023.
In 2023, DGFASLI recorded 40 non-fatal factory injuries in Haryana. That same year, SII assisted 1,041 injured workers in the state.
"The official count depends on factories reporting their own accidents, and most of them simply don't, not even the serious ones,” said Raina. “The frustrating part is that the data already exists within the system. ESIC's disability records show numbers similar to ours, and if the government used and triangulated them, we would finally have an honest picture of workplace safety.”
What a four-state survey found
For the first time, SII conducted a 30-question survey of 604 workers across Haryana, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. The survey collected information on work hours, factory environment, machines, heavy lifting, accident preparedness, inspections and training, and developed a safety index for each state.
"Karnataka and Tamil Nadu are better overall, on most indicators, when compared to Maharashtra and Haryana,” said Dhanraj. “The sharpest gaps are in the basics, government and buyer inspections that involve workers, working safety mechanisms, and training are all far weaker in Haryana and Maharashtra.”
For instance, in both Haryana and Maharashtra, not a single worker reported government inspections at their place of work involving workers. In Haryana, only 4% of the surveyed workers said inspections by OEMs or buyers involved workers, compared to 45% in Maharashtra.
While 65% of injured workers reported that an audit had taken place in the previous year at their factory, 82% said auditors did not speak to workers and 56% said they were not formally informed about the audits.
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