Plantations

In one line

A plantation employer may be required to house his workers and their families, run creches, schools and health facilities, and must train, examine, equip and warn everyone who handles pesticides.

In exam wording: section 92 of the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 empowers the State Government, without prejudice to sections 23 and 24, to prescribe requirements that every plantation employer provide housing accommodation including drinking water, kitchen and toilet to every worker and his family, creche facilities where fifty or more workers are or were employed, educational facilities where the workers' children between six and twelve exceed twenty five, health facilities to every worker and his family or coverage under the Employees' State Insurance Act 1948, and recreational facilities; and makes the employer responsible for providing and maintaining welfare facilities from his own resources or through Government, municipal or panchayat schemes. Section 93 deals with safety in the use, handling, storage and transport of insecticides, pesticides, chemicals and toxic substances, and requires qualified supervisors, training, periodical medical examination, health records accessible to the worker, washing and bathing facilities, protective clothing and equipment, a displayed list of permissible concentrations and precautionary notices.

Why the law has this at all

A plantation is not a workplace a worker travels to. It is where he lives, and where his children are born.

Tea, coffee and rubber are grown on large estates, usually far from a town, and the workforce is settled on the estate itself, often for generations. There is no municipality to lay a water pipe, no school within reach and no hospital. Whatever exists, the employer built. That is why the Plantations Labour Act 1951, repealed by section 143(1)(b), was a housing and welfare statute rather than a safety statute, and why section 92 of this Code is the only place where the Code provides for housing, schooling and the family.

Section 93 answers the other characteristic of the trade. Plantation work is chemical work. Spraying, mixing and applying pesticides is done by hand, in the open, by workers who cannot read the label and whose exposure is measured in years. Every one of the nine sub-sections of section 93 is about that single hazard, and taken together they are a small version of the hazardous process regime in sections 84 and 85: competent supervision, training, medical examination, health records the worker can see, washing facilities, protective clothing, published exposure limits and warning notices.

Some words this chapter uses

Plantation is defined in section 2(1)(zx) and is an establishment under section 2(1)(v).

Creche is a room for the care of young children while their parents work.

Municipality and Panchayat, by the Explanation to section 92(2), have the meanings in article 243(e) and article 243(d) of the Constitution.