India looks to better worker safety through economic growth
On a building site in south Mumbai, the construction of new high-rise
flats is well under way. Over the road, an apartment block exterior is
being redecorated.
Although the builders are in yellow hard hats, most of them wear
sandals and don’t have gloves. The painters, meanwhile, are barefoot,
perched without safety harnesses on bamboo scaffolding poles three
storeys above the ground.
Such sights are commonplace in India and by no means the worst
examples of working practices considered dangerous elsewhere in the
world.
According to the United Nations’ International Labour Organisation (ILO),
nearly 50,000 Indians die from work-related accidents or illness every
year.
Construction site in India. Courtesy: Google |
But one organisation is trying to improve India’s occupational health
and safety record, eyeing the country’s economic growth — and investment
by foreign firms with higher standards — as one way of doing so. “With
globalisation, we are finding that there has been a substantial
improvement in health and safety in different sectors,” said the head of
the National Safety Council of India (NSCI), K.C. Gupta.
“It (change) will come by virtue of economic growth in the country.
I’m positive about that. Realisation is coming but the practice takes
time,” he told AFP at the body’s headquarters in Navi Mumbai.
Despite his confidence, Gupta, a 73-year-old trained electrical
engineer who has worked in the health and safety sector for more than 30
years, admits that changing the status quo is a “huge job”.
Details of workplace accidents are a regular feature in the country’s
newspapers. Most merit only a few paragraphs.
But in July, more attention was paid when six people were killed and
more than a dozen others injured when a partially constructed bridge
collapsed on New Delhi’s flagship metro project.
Bosses later said that more than 90 workers had died in accidents
during the construction of the network in the last 10 years. Elsewhere
there have been claims of 48 deaths and nearly 100 serious injuries
among construction workers on projects for next year’s Commonwealth
Games in the Indian capital.
There are some 337 million workplace accidents in the world every
year, 2.3 million of them fatal, according to the ILO, with poor workers
in countries experiencing rapid industrialisation most at risk.
India has a raft of legislation to regulate individual sectors, from
mining and factories to construction and agriculture, but like many
areas, enforcement is often lacking, said Gupta.
“The main problem is that government doesn’t come out with the
legislation, knowing that they won’t be able to provide the manpower to
carry out the inspection,” he explained.
Existing laws are either outdated or “fragmented... piecemeal.
There are overlapping jurisdictions of enforcement agencies”, which
can lead to confusion and no enforcement at all, he added. To combat the
problem, Gupta said a comprehensive law should be passed like Britain’s
Health and Safety At Work Act 1974, which covers everything from offices
to building sites and gives enforcement officers powers of prosecution.
The British law, although derided in some quarters as evidence of a
meddling “nanny state”, puts the onus on employers to protect the health
and safety of their employees and the general public “as far as is
reasonably practicable”.
Gupta said the informal sector, in which the majority of Indians work
for a daily wage, as well as the country’s unenviable record of having
the world’s deadliest roads, should be given special attention.
MUMBAI, AFP |