The sector contributes about 11 per cent of India’s exports and employs more than two million people.
The Maharashtra government has ordered an investigation into Thursday’s chemical factory blaze which killed at least 11 people in an industrial complex in Thane and injured more than 60 others. By all accounts, the food colouring factory used highly reactive chemicals. Maharashtra’s Industry and Labour Department has said that the unit’s boiler was not registered under the Indian Boiler Act, 1950. Chief Minister Eknath Shinde has promised “strict action” against those at fault.
Culpability for the incident should, of course, be fixed. But safety-related concerns about the Thane industrial complex are not new. In 2016, a fire accident at the complex claimed five lives. Explosions have been reported from the area in 2018, 2020 and 2023 as well.
CM Shinde has said that the highly hazardous units would either be shut down or “given the option to shift to another location”. That’s a knee-jerk reaction. Shutting down industries or relocating them causes economic disruption and livelihood losses. The Maharashtra government should nudge these factories to follow industrial safety and environmental rules.
India is among the top six chemical manufacturing countries in the world. Diverse industries — pharmaceuticals, pesticides, fertilisers, paints and petrochemicals — collectively account for more than 70,000 of the products that are made from chemicals. The sector contributes about 11 per cent of India’s exports and employs more than two million people.
Although the country has 15 Acts and 19 rules governing different aspects of the chemical industry, none of them deals exclusively with the sector. At the same time, the overlapping jurisdictions of different ministries work to the detriment of effective regulation. Monitoring and inspection are weak and most often, these exercises involve imposing fines on erring units — which, by all accounts, breeds corruption. The NDMA website shines a light on the chemical industry’s regulatory deficits.
The industry, it says, comprises “1,861 major accident hazard (MAH) units” and “thousands of registered hazardous factories (below the MAH criteria)”. The agency’s figures do not include factories in the unorganised sector.
NDMA estimates that the country reported 130 chemical accidents in the last decade, which claimed more than 250 lives. It, however, gives no details of these accidents. Studies with smaller sample sizes — such as that conducted by scientists from IIT Kanpur’s Department of Industrial and Management Engineering in 2023 — conclude that industrial accidents result from inadequate regulation, a lack of awareness of how to act when a mishap occurs and poor investment in worker safety. However, the country lacks a comprehensive database of chemicals used by industry and the risks associated with them.
The horrors of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy in 1984 did lead to a rethinking on industrial safety, but accidents have not been followed by serious stock-taking — these include the Jaipur oil depot fire of 2009, Thane explosion of 2016, Visakhapatnam gas leak of 2020 and the blaze at a natural gas well in Tinsukia in 2020. A rapidly-industrialising country cannot afford such a knowledge deficit.
