The new Labour Codes: why easier compliance does not mean less accountability

When we talk about India’s new Labour Codes, much of the discussion naturally focuses on what has become simpler.

Multiple laws have been consolidated. Registration, licensing, returns and record-keeping requirements are being rationalised. The approach to enforcement is also changing, with greater emphasis on facilitation and opportunities to rectify certain non-compliances before they escalate.

For businesses, these are significant changes.

But there is another side to the reforms that deserves equal attention.

If the regulatory system is moving towards greater trust and self-regulation, organisations must be prepared to demonstrate that this trust is justified.

That changes the compliance question.

For occupational health and safety, that distinction matters.

Decriminalisation is not deregulation

One area that can easily be misunderstood is decriminalisation.

The direction of reform is towards reducing criminal consequences for a number of minor, technical and procedural violations, with greater use of monetary penalties, administrative mechanisms and opportunities to rectify non-compliance.

It would be a mistake, however, to interpret this as a weakening of health and safety obligations.

Organisations still have duties to identify risks, implement appropriate controls, ensure competence and protect workers. In areas where failures can result in serious injury or death, accountability remains particularly important.

There is also a broader change in the enforcement philosophy. The terminology itself is revealing: the traditional inspector becomes an Inspector-cum-Facilitator, combining enforcement with guidance and compliance support.

The responsibility for identifying an unsafe condition, assessing its significance and correcting it must exist within the organisation before an inspection takes place.

Greater regulatory trust therefore requires stronger internal ownership, not weaker controls.

Due diligence needs evidence

Consider a familiar workplace situation.

The organisation may have a machine-guarding procedure. Employees may have attended training. Inspection records may exist.

But those documents alone do not answer the most important question: what did people actually do when the risk became known?

01 If work continued, why was it allowed to continue?

02 If it stopped, who made that decision?

03 Was the hazard recorded and corrected?

This is where due diligence moves from an abstract legal concept into everyday safety management.

When an incident is investigated, saying that an organisation takes safety seriously is not evidence. What matters is what was known, what was reasonably foreseeable, what decisions were made and what controls were implemented.

Documentation therefore matters, but its purpose should not be to create paperwork.

A checklist completed mechanically is weak evidence. A record showing that hazards were identified, alternatives considered, competent people consulted and appropriate controls selected demonstrates something much more important: the organisation thought about the risk before accepting it.

Safety needs to begin before work begins

One of the more important themes within the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions framework is the attention given to designers, architects and project engineers.

Traditionally, when an accident occurs during construction, production or maintenance, attention naturally moves towards the people closest to the event.

Those questions may be necessary. But sometimes they begin too late in the chain.

A worker can inherit a risk created months or even years earlier.

Difficult maintenance access may originate in equipment design. A fall exposure may have been created during layout planning. An unsafe intervention may become necessary because isolation was not properly considered when machinery was specified.

By the time the worker encounters the hazard, many important decisions have already been made.

The new framework places greater attention on considering health and safety during planning and examining opportunities to eliminate or minimise risk.

For an organisation, the practical question becomes:

That means looking at the standards reviewed, hazards identified, alternatives considered and reasons particular solutions were selected at the design stage itself.

Safety professionals therefore need to become involved earlier:

Finding a hazard after it has been designed into the workplace is usually both more difficult and more expensive than eliminating it at source.

Buying expertise does not transfer responsibility

The same principle applies when organisations appoint consultants, contractors and specialist suppliers.

There can be an assumption that appointing a specialist transfers the problem to that specialist.

If an organisation appoints a project management consultant, for example, it should be able to answer a basic question:

Nobody needs to be an expert in everything.

The important point is to recognise the limits of competence and bring in appropriate expertise where required.

Contractor and consultant pre-qualification should therefore go beyond price, previous clients and certificates. Organisations need to understand whether the people undertaking the work possess the knowledge, skills and experience appropriate to the risks involved.

Competence is more than a certificate

This leads to another important distinction.

For many organisations, a certificate becomes a convenient proxy for competence.

A worker attends a course. A certificate is issued. The training record is updated.

Training and qualifications remain important, but organisations should go further.

Can the person recognise abnormal conditions?

Do they understand the hazards associated with the equipment?

Can they respond appropriately when circumstances change?

Can they perform the task safely under actual workplace conditions?

These are questions about competence, not attendance.

For safety professionals, that means looking beyond the training matrix and considering how competence is verified in practice.

What happens when a worker raises a concern?

Another test of the safety system appears when workers report unsafe conditions.

What happens to that information?

Some organisations have mature mechanisms through safety committees, reporting channels and supervisor engagement. Others record concerns but provide little visibility about what happens afterwards.

There is a wider lesson here.

That does not mean every suggestion must be accepted. There may be valid technical or operational reasons why a proposed action cannot be implemented.

But the decision should be considered, recorded and communicated.

Closing the feedback loop builds confidence in the reporting system. Ignoring concerns does the opposite. As per a new provision in the OHSWC Code, the employers are required to send a summary of all the safety concerns received from workers indicating the corrective actions taken or the reasons why it was decided not to take any action to the Local Inspector cum Facilitator at regular intervals.

What should organisations do now?

The temptation with major regulatory reform is to begin by rewriting policies.

That may eventually be necessary, but it should not be the starting point.

Look at how designers and project teams consider risk. Review the competence of all the contractors and consultants. Examine how machinery and equipment are procured. Test whether competence is demonstrated rather than assumed.

Then examine the evidence supporting those decisions.

One question can be particularly useful:

That question will often expose weaknesses that a conventional compliance checklist misses.

The Labour Codes represent an important change in India’s regulatory environment. Simplification, digitalisation and a more facilitative approach to enforcement can reduce unnecessary administrative burden and give responsible organisations greater room to manage compliance effectively.

The more the regulatory system expects organisations to manage themselves, the more important their internal capability becomes.

Role of health and safety professionals cannot simply be to prepare an organisation for the next inspection. It is to help create systems in which risks are anticipated, competent people make informed decisions, and the organisation can demonstrate why those decisions were reasonable.