Latest Amended Safety Rules- For Pune Division-Height Work.

Latest Amended SAFETY 

HEIGHT WORK -PUNE 

DIVISION.

Fatal Heights: The Untold 

Deaths Of India's 

Construction Workers.

 India's construction industry is the country's second-largest employer and contributor to economic activity, after agriculture. 

According to government estimates, it grew by 80 percent in the last four years, from $78 billion in 2013 to approximately $140 billion this year.

But there is a darker side to this explosive growth. For all the big money involved, the sector has scant regard for the safety of those who work in its lowest rungs.

Every year, hundreds of the men and women workers either fall to their deaths or are electrocuted or are buried under rubble.

Many more are grievously injured.

One of the reasons why these accidents cause scant alarm - or measures to ensure greater safety - is because little or no official record exists of the deaths of workers in construction.

The only official data we could find is a Lok Sabha reply on 16 March 2015, which shows 77 deaths at construction sites across the country from 2012 to 2015.

We filed Right To Information (RTI) requests in 17 states, asking for details of deaths and injuries of construction workers between 2013 and 2016.

The RTIs were filed with the Labour Ministry, as well as the police commissioners of 26 cities, as deaths at accident sites have to be reported to the police.

The Ministry forwarded our application to a number of other institutions and the trial went cold.

We received replies from police establishments of 24 cities in 17 states. This showed 452 workers died while 212 were injured on construction sites between 2013 and 2016.

Just this figure alone is six times the number cited in the Lok Sabha.

But compared to the scale of construction workers - an estimated 7.5 crore - 452 deaths may seem like a small number. 

The numbers, however, may be far from accurate.

In addition to the RTIs, NDTV directly approached police departments in major Indian cities to collate data from the same time period, based on police records. We received data from two police jurisdictions - Mumbai and Thane.

We also tapped NGOs collecting data on the deaths of construction workers.

Based on those additional numbers, and adjusting for double counting, the figure more than doubled, to 1,092 deaths and 377 workers injured between 2013 and 2016.