NDTV: New Delhi: Sunday,
March 11, 2018.
New data released by the government to the
parliament on the number of workers killed or injured on construction sites may
be dramatically underestimating the scale of such accidents, NDTV has found.
The data which also includes figures for deaths
and injuries of workers engaged in mining and factory work - was released in
the Lok Sabha this week in response to a question from Communist Party of
India-Marxist lawmaker Sankar Prasad Datta.
But compared to the findings of an NDTV
investigation conducted last year to count fatalities and injuries at
construction sites, the labour ministry's reply appears to fall far short of
reflecting the true scale of the problem.
From 2013 to 2016, the years for which government
data overlaps with our investigation, the Labour Ministry reports only 156
deaths and 53 injuries.
These Lok Sabha replies, however, have no
information on Union Territories, Goa, Uttarakhand and from the North Eastern
states (excluding Assam).
For the same period, data collected by NDTV
through Right To Information (RTI) requests from state governments gives the
number of deaths as 453, nearly three times as many as the number cited in the
government reply. The number of injuries as per our count is 212, four times
higher (RTI data for Odisha, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana and Jammu and Kashmir
was not available to NDTV).
The NDTV report, the result of an investigation
spanning five months, was an effort to create a first of its kind database of
fatalities and injuries at work sites, an area for which data collection
remains patchy.
We filed RTIs across 24 cities in 17 states, as
well as sourced data from police departments.
The government has so far released data to the
parliament on deaths at construction sites twice - once in 2015 and then this
week.
Adding the data we collected from urban police
departments, specifically from Mumbai and Thane, as well as RTI data collected
by a Gujarat-based NGO, Bandhakam Mazdoor Sangathan, the gap widens even
further. The number of deaths during the same period of 2013-16 climb to 1,090,
almost 10 times more than official estimates, while the injuries go up to 389,
over six times higher than the number the government disclosed in the
parliament.
Curiously, NDTV's data as well as of the
Bandhakam Mazdoor Sangathan is based on RTI replies, sent by state
governments. The Labour Ministry's reply mentions as source the Chief Labour
Commissioner.
Attempts made to get response from the Labour
Minister proved unsuccessful.
The state-wise break up of deaths and injuries of
workers reflects the gross mismatch. For instance, according to the Labour
Ministry, there were no deaths in Andhra Pradesh between 2013 and 2016, while
the RTI replies to NDTV show that 39 construction workers died in the same
period due to accidents.
Similarly, in Delhi, the ministry has recorded
only six deaths but the RTI reply to NDTV reports 47 deaths.
Rajeev Gowda, Rajya Sabha MP from the Congress,
who has raised the question of workers safety in parliament, told NDTV that
"the government cannot speak in two voices here (in parliament)."
"If they provide one set of data to RTI
applicants the same data needs to be provided to the members of parliament
asking these questions. This is actually highly objectionable and probably in
violation of parliamentary accountability so this is something I'll follow up
and bring it up in the parliament," he said.
(Sonal Matharu, a former NDTV reporter, who
contributed to this report is now a freelance journalist)
.JPG)
.JPG)
