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A DIPPING GRAPH IN OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY AND HEALTH
What the article is about?
- Talks about the issues associated with Occupational Safety and Health (OSH)
Syllabus: GS-II Issues relating to development and management of Health, Human Resources; Government policies and interventions.
Occupational Safety and Health:
- OSH is an existential human and labour right.
- Two primary requirements to ensure safe workplaces, viz.
- strong monitoring (inspections) and
- a comprehensive database to frame corrective actions and policies.
- Recently, the CRUSHED Report 2021 released by Safe in India (SII) portrays a dismal picture concerning occupational safety and health.
Major shortcomings in India's OSH:
- Data produced are not representative of the situation in India as several major States default in the provision of data to the Labour Bureau.
- For example, during 2013-14, several major States such as Delhi, Gujarat, Kerala, Odisha, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal defaulted; then the all-India statistics were reduced to that extent.
- Massive underreporting:
- The number of non-fatal injuries declined from an average of 21,370 during 2010-2015 to 5,811 during 2016-2019.
- The reported figures for fatal injuries for all-India would be less by around 40%-50% and that for non-fatal injuries by at least 50%.
- Weak Inspections:
- According to the Directorate General, Factory Advice and Labour Institutes Standard Reference Note for 2020 in 2019, the proportion of working in sanctioned posts for factory inspectors (the employment rate) for India was 70.60%.
- But major States such as Maharashtra (38.93%), Gujarat (57.52%), Tamil Nadu (58.33%), and Bihar (47.62%) had poor employment rates of inspectors.
- In 2019, there was an inspector for every 487 registered factories: this reveals the heavy workload of inspectors.
- There is only 1 inspector for every 25,415 workers.
- Poor convictions:
- For all of India, the conviction rates (percentage of convictions in total cases decided) for 2015-2019 stood at 61.39% and the average fine per conviction was ₹12,231 (not good enough to be a deterrent).
- The efficiency of the penal system is low as the percentage of decided cases out of total (cases pending at the beginning of the year plus those raised during the year) cases is a poor 15.74% during 2015-19.
Way Ahead:
- India has ratified ILO conventions, the Labour Inspection Convention, 1947 (C081) and Labour Statistics Convention, 1985 (C160); and thus these defects violate the conventions.
- The labour codes, especially the OSH Code, the inspection and the labour statistical systems should be reviewed as the Government is in the process of framing the Vision@2047 document for the Labour Ministry.
