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 by the Department of Factories was undertaken in December, but no action seems to have been taken against Sigachi.

All of this points to a systemic collapse in regulatory oversight and corporate accountability.

But Sigachi is hardly an exception.

Just a day after the tragedy in Telangana, eight workers were killed and five injured in an explosion in Tamil Nadu’s Virudhnagar district. It was the eighth such accident in the district this year alone.

According to data from IndustriAll, a global union of workers, 400 people died last year in 240 accidents in India’s manufacturing, mining and energy sectors. Most of the accidents took place in pharmaceutical and chemical units.

The government’s own data paints a disturbing picture. According to the Union labour ministry’s statement in Parliament in 2021, at least 6,500 employees had died on duty at factories, ports, mines and construction sites in the previous five years.

Some of these accidents were big enough to make headlines, albeit fleetingly.

Take for instance the blast in Amudan Chemicals in Maharashtra’s Dombivali that led to 13 deaths in October. The Directorate of Industrial Safety and Health found that, as is being reported about the Sigachi plant, the explosion was the result of heat building up because of the lack of alarms and adequate cooling systems.

“There is clear evidence that the accidents occur as a result of severe negligence of safety rules, a weak supervisory system, inadequate factory inspections and the employment of large numbers of untrained precarious workers,” IndustriALL noted in its report.

For example, a fire in a chemical plant in Pune that was running without a no-objection certificate from the fire department – or even a licence under the Factories Act – killed 17 workers in June 2021. No inspections had been carried out at SVS Aqua Technologies between 2012 and 2020.

The list goes on.

It is not just industrial plants. Even hospitals operate with poor fire safety equipment. In an investigation, Scroll found that out of 484 government hospitals audited in Maharashtra in 2021-’22, an astonishing 90% were functioning without no-objection certificates. Of the eight big government-run hospitals in India, four had no clearances.

The enforcement of India’s fire safety rules is patchy, often compromised by local-level corruption, bureaucratic delays and the absence of surprise inspections. Small and medium enterprises, desperate to avoid red tape or the cost of compliance, often skip it entirely.

Ashutosh Bhattacharya, regional secretary of IndustriALL (South Asia), told Scroll that as per the Factories Act, 1948, labour inspectors must inspect units to assess their processing protocols and labour safety measures.

“But such inspections are not undertaken,” Bhattacharya said. “There is a shortage of labour inspectors.”

He said it was time for India to implement the International Labour Organization’s convention number 81 that mandates a labour inspection system for workplaces.

Another safety hazard, he said, was industries employing untrained workers.

“In recent years, the Indian government has relaxed workplace inspection and licensing regulations to promote business growth,” IndustriALL noted in its report.

Bhattacharya is worried that the government may dilute legal provisions even further.

“The new labour code states that a labour inspector must inform a unit well in advance before inspection,” Bhattacharya said. This will leave plenty of time for a unit to cover up their lapses.

Without an adequate oversight mechanism, the price is paid by poor workers – many of whom, as in Sigachi, meet with death far away from home.

Here is a summary of the week’s other top stories.

Parliament breach case. The Delhi High Court granted bail to two persons accused in the 2023 Parliament security breach case. The bench barred Neelam Azad and Mahesh Kumawat from holding press conferences, giving interviews and posting anything on social media about the incident.

The two argued that the police had wrongly invoked the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act against them, and that their actions did not construe an act of terrorism.

On December 13, 2023, two men, Sagar Sharma and Manoranjan D, jumped into the Lok Sabha chamber from the visitors’ gallery and opened gas canisters. Outside Parliament, Azad and another man, Amol Dhanraj Shinde, opened smoke canisters and shouted “stop dictatorship”. All four were arrested in connection with the breach. A day later, the police arrested Lalit Jha, allegedly the mastermind behind the incident, and Kumawat, a co-accused.

The Bengaluru stampede case. The Karnataka High Court asked the state government to justify the continued suspension of Bengaluru’s Additional Commissioner of Police Vikash Kumar Vikash after the June 4 stampede outside the Chinnaswamy Stadium, which killed 11 persons. The government had suspended Vikash and four other police officers, accusing them of dereliction of duty.

Vikash had challenged the suspension before the Central Administrative Tribunal. On Tuesday, the tribunal quashed the order, saying that the officer had been suspended without sufficient grounds. It had also directed the state government to reinstate Vikash immediately.

The state government moved the High Court challenging the tribunal’s order. On Thursday, the High Court asked whether transferring the police officer would have been a sufficient measure instead.

Language politics in Maharashtra. Seven persons, believed to be members of the Raj Thackeray-led Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, were booked for assaulting a shopkeeper in Thane district’s Mira Road for not speaking in Marathi.

Babulal Khimji Chaudhary stated in his police complaint that members of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena came to his shop on June 29. When a worker in the shop spoke to them in Hindi, they got angry. They allegedly abused the worker for not speaking Marathi.

“Two of the men came to me and again said that I need to know Marathi if I have to work and then assaulted me after an argument,” said Chaudhary. He added that the suspects made a video of the incident and uploaded it on social media.

Also on Scroll last week

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