Why workers continue to die in industrial accidents in India

On Monday, an explosion at a pharmaceutical plant in Telangana killed 40 people. Most of them were migrant workers from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh.

A manufacturing unit at the plant owned by Sigachi Industries had heated up to dangerous levels, leading to a massive blast and a fire that engulfed most parts of the facility. The alarms and automatic temperature control systems failed.

All that is left now is hot black debris.

Could this tragedy have been averted? Yes, if the authorities had heeded the red flags.

For instance, the plant did not have a no-objection certificate from the fire department, PTI quoted an unidentified fire department official as saying.

This certificate is issued after the department carries out an audit to ensure that the premises have a firefighting system in place.

Without this, the Sigachi plant should not have been running at all.

A senior official from a Telangana government regulatory body told the Deccan Herald that the plant Sigachi had not put in place basic measures to prevent blasts. It lacked fire alarms and automatic shutdown mechanisms. It did not even have a proper evacuation protocol.

The relatives of the dead workers have claimed that workers had frequently complained to the management about the “deteriorating condition of the machinery”. But they were ignored.

A government inspection...

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