Industrial safety accountability ?

DECCAN INQUIRER  

e news  bi-weekly

EDITOR: NAGARAJA.M.R ....

VOL.22 .. .ISSUE...55……09/07/2026

Industrial deaths in India ? Accountability ?

At 2:30 in the afternoon on April 14, 2026, an explosion at Vedanta’s Singhitarai power plant in Chhattisgarh’s Sakti district killed 24 workers, with a dozen more injured. 

The workers were from West Bengal, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh. Their obituaries map the Indian migrant labour economy: painters from Bihar, welders from Jharkhand, workers moving across states into subcontracted work with no union protection. 

An FIR has been registered against Vedanta chairman Anil Agarwal under sections covering causing death by negligence.

Three Dead Daily

The Singhitarai blast is not an aberration. It is a data point, just one more entry in a pattern so consistent now that the blasts do not even reach the corridors where they must.

Between 2017 and 2020, three workers died and eleven were injured every single day, on average, in India’s registered factories, according to DGFASLI data obtained through RTI by IndiaSpend. That is close to 1100 deaths per year, year after year and only in registered facilities.There would be many more in thousands of unregistered establishments.

By December 2024, IndustriALL an industrial labour union documented at least 240 workplace accidents in manufacturing, mining, and energy sectors, resulting in over 400 fatalities and more than 850 serious injuries. Nearly 90 per cent of India’s workforce is in the informal sector and does not appear in any official count. 

Simply, they don’t count.

The underreporting problem is severe. Safe in India Foundation’s CRUSHED 2025 report tracked over 8,500 injured workers in the auto-component sector alone since 2016, with a 35 per cent year-on-year rise in injuries in 2024. The Economic Survey 2024-25, drawing on SII’s submissions, places the GDP loss from occupational accidents and illnesses at approximately 4 per cent globally, with India estimated at 4–14 per cent a range that translates to several lakh crore rupees annually in suppressed productivity.

Even among NIFTY-500 companies India’s most scrutinised, best-resourced corporations — a 2023 workplace safety study found 463 fatalities and 10,733 injuries in FY 2022-23. That is still more than one death per day among employers with boards, ESG disclosures, and investor oversight. For the rest of the industrial economy, the numbers are significantly more and invisible.

The Architecture of Negligence

The workers who died at Singhitarai were subcontracted through NGSL, not directly employed by Vedanta reflecting a broader industry model that shifts responsibility downward. 

This layered system of principal companies, subcontractors, and migrant contract labour creates systemic safety risks. 

Cost-cutting by subcontractors often comes at the expense of maintenance, safety, and training, while workers lack union support, adequate hazard awareness, and accountability from the company that owns the equipment.

The second problem is enforcement. In 2020, India had 363,442 registered factories. Only 69 per cent of 1,040 sanctioned inspector posts were filled approximately one inspector for 412 working factories as the Indiaspend analysis shows. The vacancy figures have not materially improved since 2020. 

Inspections, when they occur at all, happen after tragedies rather than before them.

The third problem is what happens when workers die. Between 2018 and 2020, 3,331 deaths were recorded in registered factories. Only 14 people were imprisoned for Factories Act offences during the same period. A conviction rate that low does not function as deterrence. It functions as reassurance — a standing signal to employers that the legal risk of negligence is manageable.

The Law That Did Not Follow Through

India does not lack workplace safety legislation. The Factories Act, 1948, mandates licensing, safety provisions, and worker protections. The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020 was notified on November 21, 2025, bringing it formally into force after five years of parliamentary passage.

For deaths caused by employer negligence, it prescribes up to two years in prison or a minimum fine of Rs 5 lakh, an improvement on the Factories Act’s Rs 25,000, though still inadequate for corporations of Vedanta’s scale. But the OSH Code’s notification is not the same as full implementation. Gujarat has notified OSH Code rules, and the Centre published draft central rules on 30 December 2025, but implementation across states has been uneven and state-level rules have been rolling out gradually.

The Code also replaces traditional inspectors with ‘Inspector-cum-Facilitators’, a role that includes advising employers on compliance rather than only enforcing against them. IndustriALL has consistently warned that self-certification provisions in the new codes will allow employers to assert compliance rather than have inspectors verify it.

What Has to Change

The shortage of inspectors is a basic but critical failure and the easiest to fix. Increasing their number is a direct life-saving investment. The current ratio of one inspector per 400+ factories must be urgently improved, with recruitment treated as a priority, not a backlog. States must also properly implement OSH Code rules and ensure strict accountability for non-compliance.

Penalties need to match the actual cost of a life. The OSH Code’s Rs 5 lakh fine is a gesture. Criminal prosecution for employer negligence resulting in death needs to become a realistic expectation, not a rare exception triggered by political visibility. Of the 3,331 factory deaths between 2018 and 2020, 14 resulted in imprisonment. 

That ratio has to change, and the Singhitarai FIR is the immediate test case.

Principal employer liability needs to be enforced in practice. If the equipment is Vedanta’s, if the plant is Vedanta’s, the safety duty cannot end at the subcontracting boundary. The OSH Code nominally extends obligations to principal employers for contract workers.

 Enforcing it would require courts to treat ‘subcontracted’ not as a shield against liability but as a description of the payment structure, not the safety responsibility.

Migrant workers need to be counted. The workers who died came from six states. Their deaths were recorded in Chhattisgarh, if recorded at all.

The e-Shram portal has registered over 30 crore unorganised workers, including migrant labour, but it does not track migrant workers as a distinct category and captures no injury data. Without that data, the scale of industrial deaths remains invisible, and policy remains aimed at a fraction of the problem.

With the OSH Code half-implemented and state rules still missing across most of the country, the Singhitarai FIR presents a direct question: will it result in a prosecution, or will it join the 3,317 uninvestigated deaths before it? 

Three deaths a day is not a statistic. It is a system functioning as designed.

Until that answer is clear, India’s factory safety regime remains what it has long been: a system where death is predictable, and accountability is optional.

Edited, printed , published owned by NAGARAJA.M.R. @  # LIG-2   No  761, HUDCO  FIRST  STAGE , OPP WATER WORKS , LAXMIKANTANAGAR , HEBBAL ,MYSURU – 570017  KARNATAKA  INDIA

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