India looks to improve worker safety through economic growth

On a building site in south Mumbai, the construction of new high-rise flats is well underway. 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 UN's International Labour Organisation (ILO), nearly 50,000 Indians die from work-related accidents or illness every year.

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.

And amid a lack of up-to-date official statistics, he said better reporting of work-related fatalities and accidents would give a clearer idea of the scale of the problem.

In the meantime, the NSCI is running its health and safety courses for companies and trade unions and providing information, as well as rewarding best practice, with Gupta hoping the message will spread.

"In our country, the preventative approach needs to be strengthened," Gupta said.