Dangerous lives of India’s construction workers

On the morning of September 20, Singh was one of 12 workers repairing a drain next to the boundary wall of Jal Vayu Vihar, a residential society in Sector 21 of the city. Weakened by the overnight rain, the wall fell on them.

Four laborers including three laborers of Vicholana village of Singh in Badaun district of Uttar Pradesh died on the spot. Singh suffered a fracture in his right thigh and was operated upon on 26 September. District administration announced compensation 5 lakh for the deceased but apart from free medical treatment, Singh gets nothing.

“Please do something for me. The future looks very dark,” he pleads.

His story is not alone. This is what cuts thousands in the construction industry. The lack of safety nets, blatant flouting of laws and a general disregard for the rights of workers at the very bottom of the pyramid have created a deadly cocktail. Workers like Singh see no way out.

Barely 10 days after the Jal Vayu Vihar incident, on September 30, another construction worker, Shamsher Rahman, died in a 40-feet-deep pit at a construction site near Delhi’s Safdarjung railway station. Rahman, who hails from Bihar, was welding at the site when a huge pile of loose soil collapsed around him, causing him to fall into the pit.

Similarly, in February this year, five workers were killed when a huge slab collapsed at an under construction site in Yerwada area of ​​Pune. All of them were residents of Katihar district of Bihar.

In all three incidents, the affected laborers were migrants. They make up a substantial portion of the 50 million employed in construction activities, a sector that accounts for more than 8% of the country’s GDP. According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 1,630 workers lost their lives in 2021 due to the collapse of a structure. When the cause of death is extended to fall, this number multiplies to over 17,000. This makes working in the construction industry one of the most dangerous occupations in the country. According to some experts, even this grim figure may be an underestimate.

“It’s not even the tip of the iceberg. Most workers in the construction industry are not registered. Therefore, they don’t show up in government records,” says Chandan Kumar, national coordinator of the Working People’s Charter (WPC), which deals with labor issues in India. A coalition of working organizations.

The poor health and safety of workers in this sector is not due to the lack of an adequate legal framework. At least a dozen acts, including more than three dozen laws, attempt to regulate the industry and empower workers by providing them with a safety net. Q: Why don’t they work?

weak enforcement

Major regulations include the Building and Other Construction Workers Act (BOCW Act 1996), the ESIC Act, the Employees’ Compensation Act, the Contract Labor Act and the Industrial Disputes Act (see chart). The problem lies in non-compliance at all levels.

“India is very good at making laws. It is in the implementation that things go awry,” says WPC’s Kumar. “Workers can file unilateral complaints, which should trigger an automated investigation by the labor inspectorate, with companies fined if the allegations are found to be true. There is provision for installation. But nothing of that sort really happens. At every construction site, there are certain laws which are regularly violated,” he says.

The biggest example is the under-utilisation of the cess collected as part of the Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Cess Act, 1996 (1% of the total construction cost). “A large part of the cess is unutilized in Maharashtra alone, which should be used to provide some assistance to the workers. Nationally, it would be much higher,” says Kumar.

Data from the Ministry of Labor and Employment shows In India, not more than half of the total cess of Rs 43,000 crore has been spent.

Child labor is also rampant and most of the workers do not get minimum wages. A survey conducted by WPC earlier this year found that only 5% of workers get the minimum wages set by the Delhi government. The reality is likely to be worse in other parts of the country.

The government’s new labor code promises a number of reforms and seeks to move workers into the organized workforce to access benefits such as social security. Four Code-29s on Wages, Industrial Relations, Social Security, and Occupational Health and Safety will replace existing labor laws, in an effort to facilitate ease of doing business for corporates.

Out of four codes, the wage code was notified on 8 August 2019 and three others on 29 September 2020. However, since labor is a concurrent subject, rules need to be framed by both the central and state governments.

“So far only 12 states have published their own rules for the Occupational Health and Safety Code,” says Hemant Sethi, country head of the British Safety Council, a non-profit.

a question of cost

The main motivation for industry to comply or not to comply with laws is based on two things—cost and an asymmetric demand-supply equation. The desire of the authorities to look the other way only acts as an enabler.

Meanwhile, the structure of the industry, with thousands of sub-contractors under the primary project developer or builder, creates a smokescreen that comes in handy in the event of an accident.

India has one of the lowest manufacturing costs in the world, but not because of low raw material prices – domestic steel and cement prices are benchmarks for global rates. Experts say that it is the multilevel contracting system (the army of contractors and sub-contractors can be between 200 and 1,000 for a project) that brings down the cost.

In the process, critical standards on health and safety, such as registration of workers, minimum wages, safety protocols or the use of protective gear are compromised. Everything adds to the cost and for a subcontractor further down the value chain, every penny counts.

“The practice of L1 (lowest cost bidder) in business focuses on cost and impacts on quality, health and safety. In the Minimum Cost Estimation System, companies that do not have the required experience and financial capability are taking on projects beyond their means. As a result, tenders are being won at ridiculous costs – 20-30% less than anticipated,” says Vikramjit Roy, managing director, Macaffrey India, an engineering solutions company.

“Aggressive competitive bidding has pushed costs to unsustainable levels. This is about 50-60% less than a comparable economy like Vietnam or Indonesia,” says Roy.

Contractors are thus forced to make money by cutting costs in the areas that are easiest- quality, health and safety. While contractors are aware of the risks, they face competitive pressures. If one contractor does not meet the cost criterion, there are many others waiting to grab this opportunity. The market for contractors is, in essence, not supply-constrained.

The same is true for workers and this mismatch is at the core of their safety problems.

“The employee has no choice on salary negotiation or security aspects. The number of unskilled and unemployed people in the country is very high. So, supply is never a problem,” says Roy. “When something happens, the big guy with the muscle is turned away. It’s the little guy who pays the price.”

Ray of Hope

Lakhs of migrant workers went back to their villages as the first lockdown in April 2020 brought all construction projects to a standstill. These workers were mostly abandoned by their contractors.

The reverse migration, captured in photographs and videos widely circulated on social media, caused an uproar. Faced with criticism, a group of companies came together to better understand the issues facing informal workers. These were companies affiliated to national trade bodies like Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI).

The effort took the form of a ‘social compact project’ managed by Dasara, a Mumbai-based non-profit organization along with two other NGOs—Aajeevika Bureau based in Udaipur and Social Justice Center in Ahmedabad.

This project attempts to identify the workforce that is invisible, even to the large corporates that employ them, as the industry structure we talked about earlier. The project now involves 40 large corporates as well as supply-chain companies. It claims to have mapped more than 50,000 workers in less than two years – a small drop in the ocean but a start nonetheless.

“The health and safety standards are much better in projects run by big companies. They understand the reputational risk of a faint incident. But the important lesson for us is that even the best of them are unaware of how many workers engage in their chains through invisible sub-contractors, increasing the challenge of ecosystem-wide compliance,” said Dasara associate director Sonvi Khanna says

The project uses a toolkit that includes 30 parameters on which it rates companies. For example, companies are evaluated on the basis of their number of temporary and permanent workers, gender profiles, health and wages of workers. Feedback on deficiencies found is sent to the company.

“This is just a start, but what we count on. The journey is going to be a long one with continued co-solution and co-idea between industry and labor unions. We are working to add 150 large corporates over the next four years and trigger the impact for one million vulnerable workers,” says Khanna.

Other experts also believe that creating a rating system can make a difference – just like cab drivers are rated by users on the cab aggregator platform. A bad rating can mean a loss of business.

Vinayak Chatterjee, Co-Founder and President, Feedback Infra says, “One star rating for contractors can be a solution. Rating can be based on many factors including health and safety track record of workers. Rating can also be done through tender process. One of the standards in this. There is no guarantee that it will work, or if everyone will agree to come on board. But, it is worth a try,” he adds.

However, change will not come in a jiffy.

Back at Noida’s Jal Vayu Vihar, the pile of rubble is the only indication of the September 20 tragedy. As a crime scene, the police have cordoned off the area but only 200 meters further, similar construction work is underway on the drain. Like Pappu Singh, the laborers are all migrants who are working hard to meet their needs.

“It was their misfortune. Their time had come,” says Bablu, a construction worker, recalling that fateful morning. “It’s not that we’re lucky. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here.”

Bablu did not reveal his surname or age. He looks quite young. Presumably, he is a teenager who should be in school. But for him or any other migrant working on the drain, losing this job is not an option. They know the security threats. They simply ignore what is written on the wall.