INTRODUCTION
Not many policy issues in contemporary India have elicited as prolonged a discussion as the reformation of its labour laws. Since the first National Commission on Labour (1966-69) of Justice P.B. Gajendragadkar, through the second National Commission on Labour (1992-2002 of Ravindra Verma, the view of most policymakers and economists has been that the labour regulatory structure in India, of 29 central statutes and more than 100 state ones – is archaic, The labour codes of 2019-2020 legislative embodiments of these historic reform ambitions.
The OSH Code, which is now known as the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020 (hereafter the OSH Code or the Code), is one of the most significant of these new tools. It incorporates thirteen central acts, such as the Factories Act, 1948; the Mines Act, 1952 and Dock Workers (Safety, Health and Welfare) Act, 1986; Building and other construction Workers (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act, 1996 and the central Labour (Regulation and abolition) Act, It has a broad base: it refers to factories with ten or more workers who operate power, or twenty or more who do not; to mines; to docks; to plantations; to building and construction projects; and (significantly, first time in consolidated enactment) to audio-visuals production, journalism, and the manufacture of beedi and cigar.
This paper is divided into six substantive parts. Section 2 gives A historical and legislative Background of Labour Law reform in India. Section 3 discusses the innovative structural Characteristics of the OSH Code. Section 4 Critically Analyse The Substantive Provisions in Code on Safety, Health, Working Conditions, and Welfare. Section 5 examines the Enforcement Procedures and the institutions of the Code. Section 6 focuses on the area of concern, such as the contact worker, Migrant workers, and women workers. Section 7 Provides Recommendations On reform and a conclusion
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: THE ROAD TO CONSOLIDATION
A. The Pre-Reform Regulatory Landscape
At Independence in 1947, India inherited a piecemeal system of industrial Law which had been developed in response to the administrative imperatives in the British colonies and the demands of two world wars. The Factories Act, 1948, was an amendment of the Factories Act, 1934, which incorporated the previous colonial laws. Parliament passed labour legislation over the next seven decades, one law addressing each industrial hazard, each sectoral crisis, or political agitation by organised labour. The outcome was an unintegrated, thicketed landscape where compliance requirements under one establishment might be created under a dozen or more different statutes, which had different thresholds, returns, and different inspecting agencies.
The Second National Commission on Labour (2002) had a list of the costs of this architecture in detail. It was discovered that small enterprises were regularly not covered by large protective legislation due to numerical exceptions, that inspection regimes were patchy and open to rent-seeking, and that the disaggregation of social security tools left the vast bulk of the Indian informal labour force- about 90 per cent of total – completely unprotected. Four general rules of salaries, industrial relations, social security, and occupational safety were proposed for consolidation by the commission.
B. The Legislative journey of the labour codes
Consolidation of labour law was declared a policy priority of the NDA government elected in 2014, but legislative progress was slow during its first term of office due to the political sensitivity of labour reform and opposition by both organised trade unions and some industrial associations to the compliance costs. The first product of this work, the Code of Wages, 2019, was given presidential assent on 8 August 2019. Due to the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, the government launched and enacted three more Codes: the Industrial Relations Code, the Code on Social Security, and the OSH Code in September 2020. The consolidation project was completed legislatively.
It is worth reiterating through that the passage is not implementation. By the time of writing (2026), the four codes are all Presidentially assented, but none of them has been fully operationalised at the national level, where the state government and most of the central governments have not yet finalised and subsidiary rules upon which the Codes operate. This vacuum of implementations is, in turn, an important structuring issue that the article revisits later.
STRUCTURAL FEATURES AND DEFINITIONAL ARCHITECTURE OF THE OSH CODE
SCOPE AND COVERAGE
Among the greatest structural contributions made by the OSH Code is its effort to bring about unity in the sectoral coverage in a single enactment. The Code in section 2 gives a definition that would apply to all selectors covered, as opposed to the verification of definitional regimes in the predecessor statutes. The Code concerns factories, mines, docks, plantations, construction sites and any establishments with ten or more workers working in an occupation listed on Schedule I, which today contains a wide variety of hazardous processes. The expansion of formal protection to the audio-visual production houses and newspaper establishments that were previously regulated by the working conditions regulations with limited enforceability is a true extension of formal protection.
With that being said, the coverage of the code has some significant exclusions. The agricultural sector, which hires about 40 per cent of the Indian labour force, is not much covered by the Code. There is no inclusion of domestic workers, who are estimated to be more than four million in India. Those small workshops with fewer than ten workers with power, or fewer than twenty without, are not covered by the factory provisions. These omissions imply that the large majority of the working population of India, which is concentrated exactly in the informal and agricultural sector, carries on working outside the protective umbrella of the Code.
B. Definitional Innovations
The Code contains a number of innovative definitions that are a significant advancement over the previous framework. Section 2 (zz) defines workers in a relatively broader sense than the Factories Act, 1948 and specifically covers contract workers and workers in non-traditional occupations. The meaning of the term employer in section 2(s) has been extended to cover principals in contractual chains to fill a long-standing loophole which has seen businesses offload the burden of safety to low-finance contractors.
This Code also brings out the notion of occupational disease, which is defined in Section 2(aa) in reference to Schedule III, which contains the list of diseases related to particular hazardous processes. Importantly, the code subjects the employer to the responsibility of having a register of occupational disease and to report to the relevant authority, a provision that was not contained in most of the predecessor laws. This obligation would be codified, which would be a material progress in occupational health surveillance in India, where work-related illness and injury data are grossly underreported.
C. Delegation and Subordinate Legislation
One of the structural aspects of the OSH Code that should be critically considered is that it extensively depends on subordinate legislation. Under the Code, the central government has the authority to issue regulations on a very broad subject matter, such as hours of work, leave rights, welfare facilities, safety standards and inspection procedures in section 156. Under Section 157, state governments have the concurrent rule-making power over establishments within their territory. Section 140 established the National Occupational Safety and Health Advisory Board (NOSHAB), which has the power to make recommendations on standards, but such recommendations are not binding.
This means that the OSH Code will not operate as a full legislative device, but as a framework statute, the substantive content of which will be decided by executive regulation. There are two risks associated with the design. First, it puts much law-making power in the executive, which undermines parliamentary control over the terms and conditions of employment of workers. Second, it opens the possibility, already apparent in some state draft policies, to the bottom, with states in competition over investment providing increasingly lax occupational safety standards as part of their ease-of-doing-business agendas.
CRITICAL EVALUATION OF SUBSTANTIVE PROVISIONS
A. Safety and health standards
The OSH Code chapter IV deals with the duties of employers on safety, health, and working conditions. Section 23 places a general obligation on all employers to provide, to the best of their ability, the health, safety at Work Act 1974 of the United Kingdom, which presents new standards of reasonableness, which is conceptually more advanced than the strict liability of the Factories Act 1948, which is more litigation-prone and can be less protective in areas with limited judicial accessibility.
Section 24 requires that the employers in an establishment exceeding a size reported should prepare a written Safety Policy and should also constitute safety committees that include worker representation. These are in line with the provisions of the ILO Conventions No. 155 (Occupational Safety and Health Conventions, 1981), to which India has not ratified, but provides a normative reference point. The necessity of Safety Committees should be met, or what the quorum should be, and what authority such worker representatives should have on such committees, all of which must be the subject of subordinate rules.
The performance of the Code is more ambivalent on certain categories of hazards. Chapter VIII, addressing dangerous operations and processes, substantially replicates the Schedule I hazardous process groups of the Factories Act, 1948, with little modernisation to incorporate industrial hazards of the day, such as exposure to chemicals in pharmaceutical production, ergonomic injuries in the logistics work of the gig platform work, or psychosocial hazards in the information technology industry. The normative architecture of the Code has a serious gap in its inability to incorporate these emerging occupational health challenges into the Code.
B. Working hours and Leave Entitlements
The provisions on working hours in Chapter VI of the OSH Code are a partial rationalisation of the differing standards of the predecessor statutes. The Code provides a limit of eight hours of work per day and forty-eight hours per week, which are in line with the Factories Act, 1948. There shall be a maximum of two hours of overtime, which must not exceed sixty hours in a week, a limit, though conforming to Indian practice, to half the number of fifty hours suggested by the hours of work (Industry) conventions, 1919 (Convention No. 1) of the ILO.
Another controversial clause of the Code permits the central or state government to change working hours of any type of establishments or workers within a span of not more than three months, by notice, in the interest of public emergency. This clause, which was purportedly put in reaction to the COVID-19 experience, in effect, allows executive weakening of the protective standards of the Code itself, without authorisation by the parliament, a design quality that creates grave constitutional issues under Articles 19 and 21 of the Constitution.
The entitlements to leave under the Code are an improvement in some aspects: the one day of earned leave to every twenty days of work (which applies to adults working in a factory) is consistent with current practice, and the Code is the first to allow the accumulation of leave to be cashed in by workers in industries where it was not previously possible. But the 240 days of employment in the previous year that a worker must have to be eligible to receive earned leave practically excludes casual and seasonal workers from this benefit, a population that represents a disproportionate share of the most vulnerable workforce.
C. Welfare provisions
The welfare provisions of the OSH Code, contained in Chapter VII, bring together and in several ways extend the welfare requirements of its predecessors. Section 46 obliges employers in factories with more than 500 workers to set up and maintain a canteen and employers in some notified sectors to provide crèche provisions where there are more than fifty workers (of any gender). The gender-neutral restructuring of the crunched requirements was evoked by the female worker threshold- is modernisation that is in keeping with the changing perception of childcare responsibility.
The Code also provides that welfare officers be appointed in factories with 250 or more employees, safety officers be appointed in factories with 500 or more employees and Occupational Health Centres (OHCs) be appointed in notified sectors. The OHC requirement has not been subject to consolidated national legislation before and, assuming it is enacted, would mark a significant step in the preventive step in the preventive practice of occupational health. But the staffing and infrastructure requirements of OHCs are delegated to minor regulations, a common delegation practice that makes the actual effectiveness of such requirements unclear.
The Code also mandates the appointment of Welfare Officers in factories employing 250 or more workers, Safety Officers in factories employing 500 or more workers, and Occupational Health Centres (OHCs) in notified sectors. The OHC requirement is new to consolidated national legislation and, if implemented, would represent a material advance in preventive occupational health practice. However, the staffing and infrastructure standards for OHCs are left to subordinate rules — a recurrent delegation pattern that leaves the practical impact of these provisions uncertain.
ENFORCEMENT, INSPECTION, AND INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK
A. The inspection Regime
Enforcement of the OSH Code enforcement has been the subject of some of the most criticism by labour law scholars and worker organisations. This is done through the introduction of the Code, the Section 122, inspection scheme that substitutes the traditional system of regular physical inspection by the designated factory inspector with a web-based, computerised, risk-algorithm, and the placement of inspectors in establishments will be randomised by the use of a computerised selection.
The reasoning behind this change, to decrease the discretion of the inspector and hence to eliminate corruption and harassment of employers, makes some sense theoretically. Rent-seeking behaviour, selective enforcement and collusion between the inspector and employer have actually been linked with the traditional inspection system in India and especially in states with poor administrative capacity. Nevertheless, the massive move to an algorithm risk assessment has grave countervailing issues. Most of the worst workplaces in India are small chemical units, unregistered factories, informal construction sites, the same that risk algorithms would prioritise by defaulting on previous compliance data and registration records that such units lack.
In addition, the inspection scheme of the code is designed in such a way that it integrates the function of the inspector, facilitator and adjudicator in such a manner as to undermine the independence and credibility of the enforcement role. Section 122(4) allows inspectors to be Inspector-cum-facilitators, which is that the same person must be both the person who counsels employers on the standards and the person who punishes breaches of the standards; a role ambiguity that threatens to undermine the enforcement.
B. Penalties and deterrence
The penalty provisions of the OSH Code in Chapter XIII reflect a great improvement over their predecessor statutes in nominal terms. The Code provides fines of up to INR 2 lakh in case of contravention of the general provisions of the Code, which increases to INR 3 lakh in case of recurrent offences, and INR 10 lakh in case of contraventions that lead to the death of a worker. Corporate individuals are punished disproportionately. Serious Safety offences can be imprisoned up to three years.
Such numbers, though, have to be evaluated within the context. Indian cases of industrial disasters, such as the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy, the 2009 Jaipur oil depot fire or the 2020 Vishakhapatnam gas leak, have repeatedly shown that the main limitation to occupational safety in India is not the lack of nominal penalties in the law, but the lack of detention, investigation, and prosecution. A fine of INR 10 lakh (about USD 12,000) is nothing in comparison with the incomes of large industrial companies, and even the threat of prosecution is weakened by the slow pace of judicial procedures and, in certain instances, the involvement of politics in the criminal justice system.
C. The Role of Trade Unions
The major institutional flaw of the OSH Code is that it does not pay much attention to the collective worker voice as a safety governance mechanism. Although in Section 24, Safety Committees composed of worker representatives are available, the Code does not give workers or their unions any right to reject dangerous work without employer permission and without risk of penalty, which is provided in ILO Conventions No. 155 and in the law of many other peer economies. Lack of this right implies that workers who are at a direct risk in the workplace have to decide whether to comply with the law or protect their lives, with the latter being expected to be preferred by the power asymmetry in most Indian industrial employment relationships.
Correspondingly, the Code does not require that the workers’ representatives should be disclosed information about hazardous substances used in the production process, which is a requirement under ILO Conventions No. 170 (Chemicals Conventions, 1990). Such information asymmetry significantly contributes to the inability of workers and Safety Committees to assert meaningful control over workplace hazards.
CONTRACT WORKERS, MIGRANT WORKERS, AND WOMEN WORKERS
A. Contract labour
Contract labour is the most prominent innovation, as well as the most controversial provision, of the OSH Code. The Code repeals and supersedes the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970 (CLRA), which, over five decades, has formed the main regulatory framework of contract workers in India. Registrations, licensing, and the ban on contract labour in core operations, as provided by the CLRA, are largely replicated in Chapter X of the OSH Code, albeit with modified thresholds and simplified processes.
Some retrogressive changes have been pointed out by critics. The OSH Code increases the number of contract workers to be licensed to 20 to 50, thus deregulating the use of contract labour for small and medium-sized set-ups. The Code also does not provide any clause similar to Section 10 of the CLRA that grants the relevant government the power to bar the use of contract labour in any process, operation or other work in any establishment under certain grounds, such as the perennial nature of work. This lack of an abolition clause has been construed by some commentators as a structural normalisation of contract labour as an enduring aspect of the industrial workforce and not as a contingent and regulable exception.
B. Inter-State Migrant Workers
The provisions on inter-state migrant workers in Chapter XII of the OSH Code are a welcome and long-overdue development of the law in protecting one of the most vulnerable worker groups in India. The Code also expands the meaning of interstate migrant worker to include workers who are recruited by a contractor, which was the only case covered in the predecessor Inter state migrant workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act, 1979.
These provisions were renewed with increased urgency by the COVID-19 pandemic, which revealed the disastrous state of migrant workers who found themselves without social protection, savings, or institutional support during the sudden lockdowns in March- April 2020. The code that the portability of the social security benefits should follow the migrant workers to be kept by the central government is a reform of true practical significance. The success of such provisions will, though, rely definitely on the cooperation at the state level, the digital infrastructure, and the readiness of workers to self-register, all of which are not completely certain.
C. Women Workers
The OSH Code present several significant innovations in the safety of female employees. It is also the first time in consolidated central legislation that women workers are expressly allowed to work in any establishment, including the mines and other risky factories, at any time of the day or night, provided the employer guarantees the proper provision of safety and security. This shift is consistent with the proposal of the ILO Night Work Convention, 1990 (Convention No.171), and is a significant acknowledgement of the fact that blanket prohibitions on the employment of women, with their good intentions, often serve to restrict women to more poorly paid formal sector jobs.
The Code also reinforces the provisions concerning sexual harassment in the workplace and includes cross-references to the sexual harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013 (POSH Act), and mandates employers to post the provisions of the POSH Act in prominent places within their establishments. The above-mentioned creche provisions have been gender-neutralised. The combination of these changes will be a significant modernisation of the approach to gender equity in the workplace in the Code.
Nevertheless, the Code is not sufficient in covering the structural circumstances that have the greatest influence on the occupational safety and health of women in India. The generated workload of domesticity that creates chronic fatigue and restricts women in terms of the ability to claim workplace rights is completely beyond the conceptual frame of the Code. There are also no systematic reproductive health risks in the Code, such as exposure to teratogenic chemicals and ergonomic risks during pregnancy, which are otherwise covered by general provisions on all workers.
CRITICAL CONCERNS AND REFORM PROPOSALS
A. Informalisation and the Gig Economy
The structural rather than textual limitations of the OSH Code, perhaps, are the most basic ones: the Code is established using a paradigm of formalised, establishment-based employment that fails to reflect the realities of the modern Indian labour market. This proliferation of platform-mediated gig work – delivery riders, cab riders, freelance digital workers – has introduced a new and expanding layer of the workforce that is not legally designated but by the definitional framework of establishment, worker and employer that the OSH Code inherits from its forerunner statutes.
The OSH Code is silent on the occupational health and safety hazards facing gig workers, such as road accidents affecting delivery workers, musculoskeletal illnesses affecting those working in intensive and sedentary digital tasks, or the psychosocial hazards of algorithm control. The Code of Social Security, 2020, establishes a distinct group of gig workers and platform workers, but the OSH Code has not adjusted the definition or the substance accordingly. Any future amendment must include a reform agenda to extend OSH protections to this fast-growing segment of the workforce, in an appropriately calibrated manner.
B. Implementation infrastructure
The greatest obstacle to the OSH Code is not dogma but institutional: the labour enforcement infrastructure in India is appealing, in comparison with the size of the job. As per the statistics submitted to parliament in 2022, the vacancy rate in the central government factory inspection machinery was more than 40 per cent, with several state labour departments working with even higher vacancies. Digitalisation of inspection processes that have been encouraged by the OSH Code and other ease-of-doing-business can never replace a properly staffed, trained and resourced inspection corps.
The reform in this area needs to be addressed on three fronts: first, to fill vacancies and enhance training on the factory inspection cadres; second, to enhance the evidentiary and forensic ability of labour enforcement agencies to investigate occupational accidents and diseases; and third, to establish partnerships in enforcement with trade unions, civil society organisations and occupational health professionals who can supplement official inspection with community-based surveillance.
C. Constitutional alignment
India provides a comprehensive framework of worker protective obligations in Part IV (directive principle of state policy) of its constitution. The state is required by ARTICLE 39 (e) to ensure that the health and vitality of workers, both male and female, as well as the vulnerable age of children, are not exploited. Article 42 directs the state to offer maternity relief and fair and decent working conditions. A living salary and respectable working conditions are included in Article 43. In several rulings ranging from Unni Krishnan (1993) to PUDR V. Union of India (1982), the Supreme Court has acknowledged these guiding principles as interpretive aids to the content of the basic rights in Part III, even though they are not justiciable. Although not justiciable, the Supreme Court has, over time, in a series of decisions dating back to Unni Krishnan (1993) to PUDR v. Union of India (1982), recognised these directive principles as Interpretative aids to the content of the fundamental rights in Part III, such as the right to life in Article 21.
In Consumer Education and Research Centre v. Union of India (1995), the Supreme Court directly stated that Article 21 implicitly states that the right to health and medical care is a fundamental right of any worker and that the right to live in dignity includes the right to healthy and safe working conditions. This constitutional basis puts an obligation on the state which extends beyond the wording of any particular statute and must be used by courts and workers’ organisations to fill the gaps and ambiguities in the OSH Code, which the current article has noted.
D. Recommendations
Based on the above discussion, the following reforms or proposals are proposed. To begin with, the central government must hasten the process of finalisation of model rules at the national level based on the OSH Code, in consultation with representative trade unions, and must introduce a minimum floor of protection that the state rules may not derogate. Second, the clause of abolition of contract labour, which is equivalent to Section 10 of the CLRA, 1970, should be reintroduced in the OSH Code or dealt with in another legislative act. Third, the OSH Code must be revised to provide an explicit right of workers to decline unsafe work without any disciplinary penalty, in accordance with the norm of the ILO Convention No.155. Fourth, a progressive programme of OSH Protection extension to gig and platform workers needs to be launched, starting with definitional provisions amendments and followed by sector-specific rules for large categories of platforms. Fifth, the National Occupational Safety and Health Advisory Board also needs to be reconstructed to be tripartite and endowed with statutory powers to issue binding minimum standards, which will reduce dependence on executive rule-making. Sixth, the provisions of health infrastructure, such as setting up and staffing Occupational Health Centres as necessary under the Code, ought to be considered as a health priority and should be sufficiently supported in central and state budgets.
CONCLUSION
The four codes of labour, the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020 in particular, are a real and real legislative success. The thirteen central statutes merging, the opening up of protection to hitherto unprotected sectors, the protection of migrant workers, the modernisation of the gender-equity provisions, and the establishment of a single definitional architecture are reforms of practical importance. The fact that the Codes have been received by scholars of labour law and worker organisations in India with nothing but opposition may be understating these improvements.
Meanwhile, the criticism that is elaborated in this article is not purely technical it is a more fundamental clash in the project of reform. The Labour Codes were meant to be, and have been brought before the public, as an economic liberalisation tool- a means of decreasing compliance costs incurred by employers and encouraging investment. As legitimate as it is as an economic policy issue, this framing runs the risks of making the issue of worker protection a transaction cost to be reduced, not a constitutional requirement and part of social justice. This tension is imperfectly resolved in the OSH Code, in its dependence upon executive rule-making, in its undermined enforcement framework, in its failure to comprehensively embrace the new types of work, and in its inability to accommodate new types of work.