By Adhiraj Sahgal & Bhargvi Singh, students at National University of Study & Research in Law, Ranchi.
When on a random morning in June 2026, nine workers clocked in at the Visakhapatnam Steel Plant. By afternoon, they were no more alive , engulfed in a fireball when a ladle of molten steel erupted during casting. Preliminary reports suggest a gas-rinsing safety process may not have been completed as required. It was not an accident. It was a checklist item. Someone, somewhere, did not check and tick a box. Nine men paid for it with their lives. Who holds the accountability ? Is the system not brave enough to provide workers at least a safety environment to work? Workers risk their life in giving output to the companies and in return they do not even receive what the basic thing they are required to.
Three weeks earlier , this time in Tamil Nadu it was an ammonia gas leak again it lead to the death of five people. Prior to two months it was in Chhattisgarh, Vedanta power plant explosion which costed 24 innocent lives. Across Chhattisgarh alone -196 deaths in a timeframe of 17 months. A report by United Nations global compact says that Each year, an estimated 2.78 million workers die from occupational accidents and work-related diseases while an additional 374 million workers suffer from non-fatal occupational accidents. Nationally -48,000 workers die every year from occupational accidents according to British safety council research quoting the ILO.
These are not tragedies. They are a system performing as designed. If the statistics are present why don’t the government uses these figures to carb out best measures for the worker’s safety ? Every factory , Every mill ,Every shop – depends on the worker . In India if a worker did not come to the job , the whole shop struggles to survive in the market on that particular day. If workers are that much important to our nation why aren’t their lives ?
Answering these questions , on November 21, 2025 India implemented four unified Labour Codes, consolidating 29 separate laws. The OSH( occupational safety health ) Code 2020 is finally operational and is described as the most comprehensive workplace safety reform in India’s history. It mandates accident reporting, investigation, employer liability, health check-ups. This looks like someone answered all the questions correctly on paper because in the writings and rule books India has never looked safer in terms of workers and labour protection.
Despite these implementations, comes the Visakhapatnam explosion that happened in June 2026. it is not the only one that happened since after , it was again in the Tamil Nadu and between all these accidents the ESIC data claims that 1,85,634 permanent disablement claims settled in the financial year.
The OSH code which was implemented requires that whenever an accident causes death , the employer must immediately inform the Inspector cum Facilitator , the district magistrate and the police station . The employer holds the responsibility to make the victim’s family aware about the mishap that took place . An investigation must start as soon as the accident took place , things should not be taken lightly and if there are some irregularities on any part criminal cases must be filed in Labour court for the violations and they must be held accountable for the casualty that took place.
When the recent Singhitarai explosion (24 dead, April 2026) took place , they had an FIR registered. That is more than most.But out of the 3,317 uninvestigated deaths in the data, the FIR rate is vanishingly lesser than the number of deaths that actually happened. Inspection coverage on field is below 40 percent that even in the hazardous factories. The “randomised inspection” system under Ease of Doing Business -which Chhattisgarh’s minister defended in the Assembly lately, clearly means that some hazardous factories go years without a visit or inspection on site.
The reality lies between the gap of what OSH Code requires and what actually happens after a worker dies and this is not a gap in the law. It is a gap in the will to enforce it , implement it and work upon it.
A worker who dies in a factory accident leaves behind nothing more than a family with about zero guaranteed compensation timeline, no union to file the case, no lawyer who will take it without a fee, and a Labour court backlog that stretches over years. The ESIC exists but ESIC covers only formal employees, who are registered in the system and India’s construction sector which accounts for a quarter of all deaths that takes place in the labour sector runs largely on contract labour that falls outside formal ESIC registration.
The worker’s family does not get justice instead they get a number in a government report. And the minister tells the Assembly that the factory was inspected through a randomised system.
Section 92 of the Factories Act (now absorbed into the OSH Code) makes it an punishable offence with imprisonment and fine if a worker is killed due to an employer’s failure to comply with safety provisions. But again, the prosecution rates are negligible. The Singhitarai FIR which was filed under IPC sections for culpable homicide and negligence is the exception, not the rule established.
The simple question that raise here is why ? why was the fir not filed under the OSH codes ?
Here lies the three reasons that worth naming:
The first one being that the inspectors are understaffed and technically underpowered. Specialist technical expertise for hazardous industries barely exists or does not even exist in most state level inspection departments.
Another well reasoned statement is that the Ease of Doing Business framework which has reframed the inspectors as “Inspector-cum-Facilitators” – a designation change that signals to both employers and inspectors that enforcement is secondary to compliance assistance.
The final reason that stands in the que is that the contract labour , which means that accountability disperses and it becomes close to zero, because the principal employer points to the contractor and The contractor is often an individual with no assets. The worker’s family has no one to sue. The system was destined to fall , because no one here can be actually held accountable of the life of that labourer who died while doing his job.
The UK Health and Safety Executive prosecuted 304 cases in 2023–24, resulting in fines totaling to about £34.7 million.But in India , the prosecution rate for fatal workplace accidents in the same period is not publicly available in comparable form because the data is not collected in a way that allows comparison. And That the absence of data is itself the argument: a country that does not even count its prosecutions cannot be said to be pursuing accountability.
The next step : The Reforms to these problems
The first reforms that should be implemented is the mandatory filing of FIR within 24 hours of any workplace death, filed not by the employer but by the Inspector-cum-Facilitator automatically. As of now the reporting obligation falls partly on the employer -which is a structural conflict of interest that exists.
The second one should be that there must be a specialist technical investigation units within state labour departments for hazardous industries. As the technology enhances , the units must be technologically smart. General factory inspectors cannot meaningfully investigate a chemical plant explosion or a steel ladle failure. The investigation requires engineering expertise the current system does not have due to which it creates the gap between the implementation.
The third one that should be noticed is the public prosecution data. Every state should publish annually without irregularity and it should include the exact number of: how many workplace deaths occurred, how many investigations were opened, how many prosecuted, how many resulted in conviction. Accountability begins with visibility and actual work .
Nine men clocked in and they did not clock out. Somewhere in the chain between a safety checklist and a fireball, someone failed – an inspector who didn’t visit, a supervisor who didn’t check, a system that treated their lives as an acceptable cost of production. India now has the most comprehensive workplace safety law in its history. But the measure of a workplace safety law is not how comprehensive it looks in the Gazette or just on paper , It is whether the family of the next worker who dies can point to one person, one institution, and one prosecution that proves the law still means something. The comprehensive law came into force eight months before those nine men died. The law exists. The question this article has been asking and cannot answer is whether anyone will be prosecuted for failing to follow it. That question should keep us all awake.
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