Object and Salient Features of the OSH Code

In one line

The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 is the single Act that now governs safety, health, hours and working conditions at work, and it replaced thirteen separate Acts on 21 November 2025.

In exam wording: the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 (Act 37 of 2020) is an Act to consolidate and amend the laws regulating the occupational safety, health and working conditions of persons employed in an establishment, which came into force on 21 November 2025 by S.O. 5321(E) and which by section 143 repeals thirteen enactments including the Factories Act 1948, the Mines Act 1952 and the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act 1970.

Why Parliament made this Code

The Social Security Code answered the question what does a worker get when something goes wrong. This Code answers the prior question: what must an employer do so that it does not go wrong.

Before 21 November 2025 that question was answered by thirteen Acts, each written for one industry and each with its own inspectorate, its own registers, its own licences and its own definition of the workplace. A contractor building a factory that would later employ mine workers and use motor transport was regulated by four different statutes with four different inspectors.

The Code's answer is one statute, one registration, one Inspector-cum-Facilitator and one set of records, with industry specific provisions kept as a special Part rather than as separate Acts. That is what Chapter XI does: it is the whole of Module IV, and it holds what used to be the Contract Labour Act, the Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act, the Mines Act, the Beedi and Cigar Workers Act, the Factories Act's hazardous process provisions and the Plantations Labour Act.

The long title states the object: to consolidate and amend the laws regulating the occupational safety, health and working conditions of the persons employed in an establishment.

The date, and the difference from the other Code

This Code received assent on 28 September 2020, the same day as the Code on Social Security, and like it sat un-commenced for five years.

It came into force on 21 November 2025 by S.O. 5321(E), published in the Gazette of India, Extraordinary, Part II, section 3(ii).

And here is a difference worth marking, because it makes this Code simpler than the other one. S.O. 5321(E) is a single sentence with no schedule. It appoints 21 November 2025 as the date on which "the provisions of the said Code" come into force. There is no list, no exception and no corrigendum.

Contrast S.O. 5319(E) for the Social Security Code, which commenced that Code in pieces across three dates and needed a corrigendum of 19 December 2025 to explain itself.