Safety rules are routinely flouted in India’s factories

Indian factories routinely flout occupational health and safety rules, even as inspections remain scant, and overworked, underpaid workers operate faulty machinery leading to accidents and injuries, many of which are not counted in official statistics, a new report shows.

For instance, India’s labour rules mandate a 48-hour limit per week for factory workers, but this limit is routinely ignored. Safe In India Foundation (SII), a Manesar-based organisation focused on automobile workers' safety, has assisted over 11,000 workers since 2016 in accessing Employees' State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) entitlements like medical support and pension.

The Occupational Safety & Health and Working Conditions (Central) Rules, 2025 allow factories to operate for 12 hours a day without overtime, provided that they follow a four-day work week such that the 48-hour limit is maintained. 

However, 72 percent injured workers said they work more than 60 hours a week, while 24 percent work 48 to 60 hours. Further, many workers reported working frequent 24-hour shifts, according to Crushed 2026, SII’s eighth annual report on workplace injuries.

Two in five injured workers were aware of machine malfunctions, and 84 percent had reported these to their supervisors, but they were ignored, SII found. Nearly nine in 10 workers said that machines were inspected only after an accident or before a scheduled audit, in violation of daily checks as required.

Factories are required to maintain records on health and safety, but anecdotally, SII found that “brand new accident registers with only the current case written are kept, that too only before the audits”.

"Both government and OEM/buyer inspectors are essentially not reaching these factories, and when they do, they don't talk to the workers, which matches what more than 11,000 injured workers have told us over the years," said Dhanraj Balakrishna, senior manager, advocacy at SII.

About a fifth of workers and sixth of helpers who were assisted by SII after an injury said they did not receive a minimum wage. Only 5 percent received an appointment letter, about half do not receive salary slips, and most of those who do receive them report errors such as underreporting of working hours and lower wages for overtime.

ESIC applies to factories and other establishments like road transport, hotels, restaurants etc where 10 or more persons are employed. Employees drawing wages up to Rs 21,000 a month, are entitled to social security cover under the ESI Act.

Immediately after an accident, workers fight an uphill battle to avail their medical entitlements under the ESIC, which helps access healthcare entitlement during sickness, maternity, disablement and death due to employment injury and to provide medical care to insured persons and their families.

Three in five injured workers received their ESIC e-Pehchaan card only after their accident. The proportion was higher in Maharashtra, where 79 percent of injured workers received the card after the accident, compared with 58 percent in Haryana.

“[The] Automobile industry in India has a wide and deep supply chain. The production model seeks low and cheap costs including labour,” labour economist Shyam Sundar had told us in July 2024. “As we go down the supply chain, most regulations are weak.”

Injuries highest in a decade

In 2025 alone, the organisation assisted 2,514 workers across India’s factories—more than two-thirds of them in the auto supply chain. “SII posits that given its limited outreach nationally, many more thousands of workers continue to be injured in the automotive sector every year across the country,” the report states.

These data are based on workers assisted at SII’s Manesar, Faridabad and Gurugram centres in Haryana, and Mohan Nagar and Chakan in Maharashtra.

Last year, 72 percent of worker injuries in the automobile supply chain factories were ‘crush injuries’, which resulted in a loss of about two fingers, on average. Most of these were on the power press machine, used in the automobile industry for cutting and shaping metal which reduces labour and time to produce material.

The typical worker who sustains a crush injury tends to be non-permanent, migrant workers, who are paid less and have limited formal education or training.

In 2024, IndiaSpend reported the story of Basanti and Shyamvati, both in their 30s who moved from Rajasthan to Faridabad. They started off as helpers in automobile component manufacturing units in Faridabad, and went on to become power press operators. Neither was provided training for the work, having been forced to pick up the skills on the job. Both of them needed the extra money, and both had their hands crushed in accidents on the job at their units. Both of them were struggling to access medical entitlements, and neither was able to find work, we had reported.

Women are more disadvantaged due to gender wage disparity, illiteracy and lack of proper training to operate power presses, lack of job opportunities post accidents, family pressure, and difficulty in accessing legally entitled post-accident support, our reporting found.

In Haryana, 85 percent of injured workers were migrants, mainly from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. In Maharashtra, 63 percent were migrants, including workers from Marathwada as well as other states.

About 21 percent of injured workers operating machines had no formal education or had studied only up to grade X. Young workers accounted for a large share of injuries: Workers below the age of 30 accounted for 41 percent of injured workers in Haryana and 48 percent in Maharashtra.

Injuries across the supply chains

Nearly 98 percent of the 9,000-odd injured workers assisted since 2019 worked in the supply chain of India’s top six automobile brands—Maruti Suzuki, Honda, Hero, Tata Motors, Mahindra and Bajaj, the report found. In 2025, these six brands accounted for 1,350 of the 1,729 injured workers (78 percent) assisted by SII in the sector. 

In Haryana, injuries in the supply chains of Maruti, Honda and Hero peaked in 2022 and have since declined. But in Maharashtra, injuries rose in factories supplying to Tata Motors, Mahindra and Bajaj

Between 2018 and 2025, a single factory in Faridabad saw 76 workers with life-altering injuries, which SII says “represent a continuous operational reality where severe, irreversible injuries have become a predictable outcome of the manufacturing process”. This is despite the SII’s repeated flagging of the establishment to the government and the automobile brands that source from it.

Further, 93 percent of injury cases in 2025 involved power press machines with no safety sensors. "Where sensors do exist, they're often removed so the machine runs faster, and when workers raise the alarm, they're ignored," said Siddharth Raina, senior manager, research and advocacy at SII. "For a factory, the sensor is a small cost, for the worker, the cost is permanent, on average, two fingers lost."

Most workers received no formal training: 37 percent of injured workers said they learned to operate machines while working on them. Helpers accounted for 15 percent of machine injuries, despite machine operation being classified as a skilled role.

A 2026 review found that contractual and temporary workers faced a higher risk of non-fatal occupational injuries than permanent workers. The review suggested that temporary workers may be assigned more hazardous tasks or receive less safety training than permanent employees.

Official data capture few incidents

The Directorate General Factory Advice Service and Labour Institutes (DGFASLI) is the technical arm of the labour ministry which deals with matters related to Occupational Safety and Health in factories and dock works of major ports. DGFASLI collects statistics from state chief inspectors of factories and directors of industrial safety and health. These data represent only registered factories, although about 90 percent of workers in India are employed in the informal sector, IndiaSpend reported in January 2023.

In 2023, DGFASLI recorded 40 non-fatal factory injuries in Haryana. That same year, SII assisted 1,041 injured workers in the state.

"The official count depends on factories reporting their own accidents, and most of them simply don't, not even the serious ones,” said Raina. “The frustrating part is that the data already exists within the system. ESIC's disability records show numbers similar to ours, and if the government used and triangulated them, we would finally have an honest picture of workplace safety.”

What a four-state survey found

For the first time, SII conducted a 30-question survey of 604 workers across Haryana, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. The survey collected information on work hours, factory environment, machines, heavy lifting, accident preparedness, inspections and training, and developed a safety index for each state.

"Karnataka and Tamil Nadu are better overall, on most indicators, when compared to Maharashtra and Haryana,” said Dhanraj. “The sharpest gaps are in the basics, government and buyer inspections that involve workers, working safety mechanisms, and training are all far weaker in Haryana and Maharashtra.”

For instance, in both Haryana and Maharashtra, not a single worker reported government inspections at their place of work involving workers. In Haryana, only 4 percent of the surveyed workers said inspections by OEMs or buyers involved workers, compared to 45 percent in Maharashtra.

While 65 percent of injured workers reported that an audit had taken place in the previous year at their factory, 82 percent said auditors did not speak to workers and 56 percent said they were not formally informed about the audits.

IndiaSpend has written to the Ministry of Labour for comment on workplace injury reporting, factory inspections, and worker safety in the automobile sector supply chain. We will update this story when we receive a response.

This report is republished with permission from IndiaSpend, a data-driven, public-interest journalism non-profit. It has been lightly edited for style and clarity.