Record budgets. World-class ambitions. And a safety crisis so normalised, nobody even flinches anymore.
Can we be honest for a minute?
India is building 28 kilometres of highway every single day. New airports are opening faster than most countries build bus stops. ₹11 lakh crore in infrastructure spending, announced in a single budget, like it was nothing. The world is watching with jaw-dropped admiration.
But here is what the press release leaves out.
Somewhere on one of those shiny new project sites, a man who travelled from Jharkhand to Pune, 1,400 kilometres from home climbed onto a partially constructed flyover this morning. No harness. No induction in his language. No idea the platform beneath him hadn’t been cleared. By 8am, he wasn’t on it anymore. The project filed a report. The site was back on schedule the following week. His name didn’t make the news.
That’s the infrastructure story we don’t tell.
About 38 construction workers die every single day in India. More than mining. More than manufacturing. More than any other industry in the country. And we have somehow decided this is just the cost of building things.
It isn’t. It is a choice made every time a tender goes to the cheapest subcontractor with no questions asked about safety. Every time a safety officer covers three sites because “one is enough.” Every time a worker is handed an English induction document he cannot read, ticks a box, and is sent up a scaffold.
We even built a law for this. The BOCW Act has existed since 1996. The welfare cess it created has collected over ₹70,000 crore from project costs meant to go directly to workers. As of 2023, less than 30% had reached them.
The money is there. The law is there. And the workers are still falling.
The Rajkot gaming zone fire in May 2024 killed 28 people, many of them children. No proper fire exits. Flammable materials. Allegedly forged NOCs. And when the cameras arrived, the contractor blamed the local body, the local body blamed the owner, the owner blamed the contractor. The families are still waiting for answers. The industry moved on in a week.
This is what happens when HSE accountability is genuinely nobody’s job.
The insurance market has started doing what the regulatory system hasn’t. Workmen’s Compensation claims on large infrastructure projects are up 31% in three years. Reinsurers, the coldest risk assessors in any room are now writing HSE audit requirements directly into project policies. Translation: if you can’t show a functioning safety system, you’re going to pay significantly more for cover.
The market is saying what the regulator should have said years ago. Get your house in order. Not next tender. Now.
But here is what gives us hope.
Someone finally figured out that safety training in English, in a classroom, for workers who speak Odia or Bhojpuri, was never going to work. So the National Safety Council, working with EPC contractors across Maharashtra and Gujarat, rebuilt inductions from scratch in regional languages, as short WhatsApp videos, designed for a ₹8,000 smartphone on the bus to site. Participation jumped 60%. That is the difference between a safety system that exists on paper and one that saves lives.
L&T, Afcons, Shapoorji Pallonji are implementing ISO 45001 not because clients asked but because their own finance teams did the maths. One fatality cost programme delays, insurance claims, regulatory scrutiny, and reputational damage across the next three bid evaluations. The HSE programme starts looking cheap very fast.
The direction is set. Legal exposure is rising. The insurance market is hardening. And skilled workers are increasingly choosing employers by reputation, not just daily wage because the labour shortage is real, and sites that treat people well are winning.
The infrastructure India is building will outlast all of us. The workers building it are owed at least a fighting chance to do the same.