This thesis explores Indian construction industry safety measures and their benefit to cost ratios. In India, the construction sector is the second largest employer after agriculture. Around 50 million workers work in the construction sector to earn easy money at the end of the d
...
This thesis explores Indian construction industry safety measures and their benefit to cost ratios. In India, the construction sector is the second largest employer after agriculture. Around 50 million workers work in the construction sector to earn easy money at the end of the day. About 48,000 workers die in India due to occupational accidents every year, and around 38 construction accidents occur every day in India. This thesis analyses the social impacts of safety policies and their employers' financial implications. No such studies have been done previously for the Indian construction market. There have been studies regarding estimating the number of accidents in India, respective safety measures, etc. Implementation of safety policies can reduce the number of casualties up to 20%-30%. The performance of safety policies will benefit the workers, their families, friends, relatives, and society. It is common for Indian construction companies not to invest in construction health & safety measures because it is cheaper for them to pay the costs of compensation for accidents than modernizing their facilities to make them safer. It seems essential to understand the need to invest in safety measures from a societal perspective. Thus, this research is a study about the impacts of safety policies with cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and how the CBA results can be utilized in the decision making for the policymakers, employers, and other stakeholders in the industry. First, a literature review was conducted to better understand the Indian construction industry's problems and probable solutions. Literature was also undertaken to understand the concepts regarding the cost-benefit analysis. Additionally, interviews were conducted to get the required data to perform the cost-benefit analysis and partly answer the research questions. For the research, eight interviews were conducted with people who closely work in the Indian construction industry. Based on the interviews, five significant safety policies were identified to be implemented at the construction sites in India to reduce accidents. These five safety policies were considered as a package to perform a societal cost-benefit analysis. The societal cost-benefit analysis was performed to find the impacts of safety measures only from the societal perspective. Next to this, a business financial impact analysis for the safety measures was conducted to see their effects only from the employer's perspective. In general, the interviewees believed that the number of accidents occurs in Indian construction sites due to the lack of safety measures provided by the companies and the illiteracy of most workers and their unorganized way of working. They also suggested that these accidents can be reduced by implementing safety policies, as shown in the table below. Most of them estimated that taking these safety measures could reduce the number of accidents by almost one-fourth.