Almost everyday, there are reports of fatal accidents in factories and manufacturing workshops somewhere in the country. This is true even in factories and enterprises under the Central Government and state governments.
On 25 January 2025, a massive explosion at the ordnance factory in Bhandara (OFBA) near Nagpur in Maharashtra, caused death of 8 workers and injuries to several others. The factory is reported to have been manufacturing explosive devices. In the past too, there have been several incidents of blasts at ordnance factories under the Defence Ministry of the Government of India.
Earlier, on 16th January,the bodies of three missing labourers were recovered from the debris of a collapsed iron structure on the premises of a cement plant in Odisha’s Sundergarh district, after a 36-hour rescue operation.
On 11 January 2025, a ceiling slab of a building under construction collapsed in Khannauj Railway station in Uttar Pradesh, burying several railway workers and staff under its debris.
At least four workers died and many others were feared trapped after a chimney collapsed at a steel plant in Chhattisgarh on 9 January 2025.
In Assam, nine mine workers were trapped inside a mine in the Dima Hasao hill district on 6 January this year, after a sudden gush of water flooded the quarry. It has been reported to be an illegal mine, inoperable and clearly unsafe. Dead bodies of four workers were retrieved by 11 January. Similar tragedies have been reported in the pastfrom other districts of Assam.
Just in the recent four years, 2020-23 the number of industrial “accidents” add up to a shocking number. These are not really accidents because in each case they could have been prevented, were it not for the criminal negligence of the management.
In 2021, the Indian manufacturing industry was beset with accidents, with an average of seven accidents reported per month.In the same year, at least seventeen accidents occurred in the cement industry.In 2022, at least ten accidents occurred. The majority of the workers killed or injured were contract workers. These accidents occurred in the cement plans owned by the Aditya Birla group and in subsidiaries of multinationals, like Holcim (subsequently bought over by Adani group).
According to the Indian National Cement Workers’ Federation (INCWF), approximately 83 per cent of workers in the industry work for contractors who are hired by the cement companies.
Between 2017 and 2020, three people were killed and 11 were injured each day, on average, due to workplace accidents in India’s registered factories, according to data from the Ministry of Labour and Employment’s Directorate General Factory Advice Service & Labour Institutes (DGFASLI), obtained by the IndiaSpend news website in November 2022 through a Right to Information (RTI) request.
The data further revealed that 3,331 deaths were registered between 2018 and 2020, but only 14 people were jailed for offences under the Factories Act 1948 during the same period.
The DGFASLI gathers occupational safety and health (OSH) data from state chief inspectors of factories and directors of industrial safety and health. However, these statistics only relate to registered factories in the formal sector, while nearly 90 per cent of workers in India work in the informal sector.
The OSH Code provides more room for accidents
The new Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions (OSH) Code was enacted in 2020 with the claim that it is designed to specify minimum health and safety standards in workplaces. A closer study of the terms of the OSH Code however reveals that it will lower the threshold at which a factory must set up a safety committee consisting of workers and managers to oversee health and safety in the workplace. Under the Factories Act, a registered factory with 10 or more employees had to establish a safety committee, but under the OSH Code this is goingto be raised to 250 employees for a hazardous factory and 500 in a standard factory.
Most factory accidents are caused by inadequate or missing safety equipment, inadequate or inconsistent training to workers and violation of safety standards. Workers are not provided with adequate safety equipment at work – a clear violation of labour laws. There are no protocols and procedures that can ensure safe working conditions. Even those standard operating procedures that are present are violated, as a rule. Under the OSH code, trade unions have no mechanism to complain that safety standards are being violated.
There are few or no official audits of manufacturing companies to check if safety guidelines are being followed and implemented. In the past five years, the government has relaxed safety inspections and licensing to allow capitalists to self-certify themselves as complying with safety laws. The government has exempted companies from reporting on health and safety in the name of easing business burdens and supporting small enterprises. This is the direction of the new OSH code, despite evidence that inadequate numbers of health, safety and factory inspectors and absence of government monitoring of implementation of safety standards at workplaces are definite contributory factors to industrial accidents.
The state of health and safety further deteriorates as production moves down the supply chain to small and medium enterprises. The large companies sub-contract to smaller enterprises in order to cut costs and maximize their own profits. The smaller companies can get away with violating safety measures, as they will be exempted under the OSH Code, just as many of them have been doing under the previous labour laws as well.
Who is responsible for this anti-worker and inhuman situation?
It is more than 40 years since the gas leak disaster in the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal. Industrial accidents continue to take place at an alarming frequency in our country because the root cause of that disaster has not been eliminated. Factory owners and managements flout all safety measures under the nose of the authorities, knowing they will get away easily. This has been the case in almost all industrial disasters in our country.
Every time there is an accident, it is clear for all to see that the disaster could have been prevented if the factory had followed the prescribed standards of construction, operation and emergency response necessary to ensure the safety of workers. Money is sought to be saved at the expense of human lives by using inferior construction material, not replacing worn out and defective equipment in time despite warnings, violating environmental standards and using untrained and temporary contract workers in high risk tasks.
Capitalists, whether Indian or foreign, care more for their profits than for the safety of their workers. The concerned government ministries and departments are guilty of criminal negligence. The licensing and inspecting authorities actively collude with the capitalist owners in violation of all safety norms. Further, when disasters take place, the committees set up to investigate them are actually used to cover-up the facts and exonerate the owners.
There is deliberately no clear line of responsibility and accountability, as a result of which the capitalist owners get away scot free. In every instance of workers’ death or injury, the authorities make a show of sympathy for the families of those killed, and some ex gratia amounts are announced as compensation.
The criminal callousness of this system towards those who toil is totally condemnable and those in power must be held responsible. The owners of capitalist enterprises, their chief officers as well as the state and its authorities must be held accountable for the deaths and injuries of workers. Violation of safety standards must be treated as a crime and not just some act of omission or negligence.
Workers in every industry and sector of the economy must continue to struggle for a code of safety standards and strict implementation of the same. .The struggle for ensuring safety standards in all work places, is part of the struggle of working class against the anti-worker offensive of the ruling capitalist class.
| Major industrial accidents since the Bhopal gas disaster
In 2009, the biggest ever industrial accident in Chhattisgarh, claimed the lives of 41 labourers. A 275-metre chimney under construction at a 1200 MW power plant had collapsed on BALCO’s premises. A judicial commission found the company and the administration guilty of using substandard construction material. A serious disaster took place in 2014, reminiscent of the deadly gas leak in Bhopal on 3 December 1984. At least six workers of Bhilai Steel Plant (BSP) were killed and over 30 injured due to leaking of poisonous gas on the night of 12 June 2014. In the BSP, the plant management had been informed repeatedly over the one year before the leak occurred about the poor shape of the pipeline but no action was taken. Apparently, gas had already been leaking in smaller quantities over the previous 24 hours, before the pipeline burst. Members of the BSP Employees Union had pointed out then that the management had a history of neglecting safety. Many pipelines had not been replaced in three decades before this accident happened. May 2020 saw a major gas leak disaster in Vizag – this time at the LG Polymers plant. There was a leak of styrene gas at 3 a.m. in the morning when people in the neighbouring locations of the city were fast asleep. At least 12 people died directly due to gas exposure. An estimated 5000 people became sick due to exposure to the gas. The leak happened as the plant was being readied to be restarted after the lockdown, in violation of regulatory clearances. The owners of the plant had increased the capacity of the plant from 450 tons a day to 650 and post facto applied for environmental clearance. The state authorities had sent a notice to the company in November 2019 that it did not have an environmental clearance. Thus the attempt to start the plant was in clear violation of the environmental clearance. On 21 January 2022, six workers were killed and 29 other employees of a textile dyeing and printing factory had to be hospitalised after inhaling toxic gas from the Sachin creek in Surat district. The Gujarat Pollution Control Board confirmed that sodium hydrosulphide and sodium thiosulphate were illegally discharged into the natural creek. There are numerous other instances of blatant contamination of air, water and land in the vicinity of hazardous chemical and metal manufacturing units in the country. Prominent among them is the case of Sterlite. This company launched an expansion scheme in 2018 without permission from the authorities and ignoring mass protests. The company had a history of widespread pollution and contamination of the groundwater in the vicinity of its copper unit since commencing its operations in Thoothukudi district of Tamilnadu in1996.Many workers of the company and people in the vicinity had died and also fallen seriously ill due to accidents involving leak of poisonous gases from the factory. Besides, people of the region were reported to havefaced significantly higher incidents of cancer and lung and breathing related diseases, abortions, disabilities, etc. |