Building and Other Construction Workers under the OSH Code

In one line

A person the employer knows or has reason to believe is deaf, has defective vision or is prone to giddiness may not be put to construction work likely to involve a risk of accident to him or to anyone else.

In exam wording: section 78 of the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 provides that no person, about whom the employer knows or has reasons to believe that he is deaf, or has defective vision, or has a tendency to giddiness, shall be required or allowed to work in any such operation of building or other construction work which is likely to involve a risk of any accident either to the building worker himself or to any other person.

Why the law has this at all

Construction kills more workers in India than any other trade, and it kills them mostly by one mechanism: a fall, or something falling. A man working on scaffolding who becomes dizzy does not merely hurt himself; he drops his hammer on the men below, and he takes the plank with him.

Section 78 is therefore not a provision about disability. It is a provision about matching the person to the operation. It does not say that a deaf man may not be employed on a building site. It says he may not be put on an operation likely to involve a risk of accident to himself or to another. On a site he can hear nothing of the warning shouted behind him, and the shout is most of the safety system in a trade that runs on improvisation.

And it is the whole of Part VI, which is the striking thing about it. The Building and Other Construction Workers (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act 1996, repealed by section 143(1)(m), was a substantial statute for a trade that employs tens of millions. Part VI of this Code is one sentence.

That is not because the rest was abandoned. It is because it was distributed, and a student who answers on section 78 alone has answered a quarter of the question. The building worker's protections now sit in four places.

In this Code, outside Part VI, in the general Chapters: the designer's duty in section 9, the site prohibition order in section 38(2), temporary living accommodation in section 24(2)(v) and (vi), the ambulance room in section 24(2)(i) where more than the stated number are employed, the welfare officer where two hundred and fifty or more are employed, and the notice of commencement and cessation in section 5.

In the Code on Social Security 2020, in Chapter VIII, which carries the cess, the Building and Other Construction Workers' Welfare Board and the benefits, and which this book takes in its own chapters.