On-site mishaps a major cause of construction workers’ deaths.

Express News Service: Apr 28, 2011,

Ahmedabad Widowed with three children, Santha Mistry has for one and a half years eked out a living as a clinical trial volunteer at a hospital in the city, making anywhere between Rs 5,000 and Rs 10,000 every three months, depending on the drugs tested on her body.

Her new job was necessitated by the death of her husband in October 2009. He was a skilled construction labourer who fell from the second floor of an under-construction building in Amraiwadi.

At a public hearing on the eve of World Day for Safety and Health at Work, Mistry’s story was one of the several narrated by the relatives of workers who died on the job.

Many others were survivors of near-death experiences.

Rasika Sangada was buried alive under 15 feet of earth after the gutter she was lining on Sola Road collapsed on her. She had to be scooped out by an excavator, she said at the public hearing, flanked by her husband and her son, a toddler. But some like Kanodiben from MP were not so lucky. Buried under 20 feet of soil at a construction site four years ago, she is now paralysed waist down.

Replies to more than 30 Right to Information (RTI) applications filed by a construction labourers’ union show that 182 workers have died in on-site mishaps in Gujarat between 2008 and 2009 and as many as 160 have sustained serious injuries. Among the cities, Ahmedabad had the highest number of construction-site mishaps in these two years, with 83 dead or seriously injured in 76 reported cases, followed by Surat, Rajkot, Bhuj and Bharuch.

Vipul Pandya, general secretary of the Bandhkam Mazdoor Sangathan, said they began filing RTIs in the police stations about the on-site deaths a year ago because the data was not available with the state Labour Department. Besides, they also wanted to find out the causes of accidents so that workers could be trained and such tragedies avoided in the future, he said.

Data from the two years show that 51 per cent of the deaths occurred due to fall from heights, 16 per cent from objects that fell on the workers and 12 per cent from electric shocks. Six per cent of the deaths occurred after workers were buried alive by collapsing walls, and for the others, the cause of deaths remained unknown or unreported.

Of the 182 who died in Gujarat in the two years, about 150 were in their prime between 19 and 45 years of age and more than 90 per cent of the deceased were male.