Creeping risk: The Hindu Editorial on industrial accidents and neglect of risks

A.The engineering truth underlying recent boiler explosions is that boilers almost never fail suddenly in this way. These are often caused by excessive pressure, scaling, mismanaged water levels and/or revival stress, and the risk of each increases over time. The boiler explosion in Sakti, Chhattisgarh, which killed 20 people, also shares several similarities with the Visakhapatnam gas leak in 2020 and the explosion at a thermal power plant in Neyveli in 2020. In the first, safety systems in a unit were ineffective or uncalibrated following a post-lockdown restart, while in the second, the facility restart process triggered the explosion. The Sakti plant was also recently acquired, recently commissioned and was operating at full capacity at the time of the explosion. In these unstable operating regimes, failures are often caused by transient thermal and pressure imbalances. However, in practice, neither the national boiler inspection regime nor the regulatory framework increases oversight at these stages. The certificate is valid for up to one year, although boiler conditions change daily. The current structure also penalizes downtime rather than rewarding unsafe operations and maintenance outages. Incidents like Sakti’s are also proof that the framework’s focus on production standards rather than continuous instrumentation and monitoring is not working. The centre’s focus on “ease of doing business” has favored self-certification and scheduled third-party audits over surprise government audits. Boiler Accident Investigation Rules were notified in 2025; Time will tell whether they will address these structural gaps.

The expansion of India’s industrial capacity is further straining its aging infrastructure, with more facilities approaching their limits and flaws in their management attracting greater media coverage and political attention. It is possible that these facilities have been exposing their workers to hazardous working conditions for a long time, and the resulting crises are not entirely accidental. Contract labor is the most exposed. A growing share of the workers are immigrants, hired through subcontractors who trade blame with the operator after a disaster. Safety signs and guides are often not available in workers’ native languages. Investigators reported that workers working in the Pune industrial area since 2021 and after the explosions in Sangareddy in 2024 and 2025 were unaware of the names and properties of chemicals in their workplaces. The new OSHW Rule 2020 also does not hold the principal employer criminally liable for safety defects in the activities of contractors, but characterizes it as negligence on the part of the employer. These are old complaints about how India treats its labor. Until this culture is eliminated, firms’ and regulators’ incentives, working arrangements and factory practices will continue to absorb ‘accidents’ as the cost of doing business.