ANDThe technical reality underlying recent boiler explosions is that boilers almost never fail suddenly in this way. They are usually caused by overpressure, scale build-up, poorly managed water levels and/or recovery stress, the risk of each increasing over time. The boiler explosion in Sakti, Chhattisgarh, which killed 20 people, also shares several similarities with the 2020 Visakhapatnam gas leak and the 2020 Neyveli thermal power plant explosion. In the former, the safety systems at the unit were inactive or uncalibrated after a restart after a lockout, while a power plant restart triggered a power plant restart. The Sakti plant was also recently acquired, recently commissioned and was operating at full capacity at the time of the explosion. Failures often occur in these unstable operating regimes due to transient thermal and pressure imbalances. In practice, however, neither the national boiler control regime nor the regulatory framework will increase oversight at these stages. The certification is valid for one year, even if the state of the boiler changes every day. The current structure also penalizes downtime instead of unsafe operations and rewarding maintenance downtime. Events like those at Sakti are also evidence that the framework’s focus on manufacturing standards rather than continuous instrumentation and auditing is not working. The center’s “ease of doing business” focus has favored self-certification and scheduled third-party audits over surprise government inspections. In 2025, the Boiler Accident Investigation Rules were announced; whether they will address these structural gaps remains to be seen.
The expansion of India’s industrial capacity is pushing aging infrastructure harder, more plants are operating closer to their limits, and their management deficiencies are being exposed to greater media coverage and political attention. It is possible that these facilities expose their workers to dangerous working conditions for a long time and the subsequent crises are not completely random. Contract work is the most exposed. A growing proportion of workers are migrants hired through subcontractors who blame the operator after a disaster. Safety signage and manuals are often not available in workers’ native languages. Investigators reported that workers in the Pune industrial belt from 2021 and after the Sangareddy explosions in 2024 and 2025 were unaware of the names and properties of chemicals at their workplace. The new OSHW Code 2020 also clearly does not make the principal employer criminally liable for safety breaches in the activities of contractors, but qualifies it as negligence on the part of the employer. These are old complaints about how India handles its work. Until this culture is removed, corporate and regulatory incentives, work arrangements and factory-level practices will continue to absorb “accidents” as a cost of doing business.
Published – 17 Apr 2026 02:20 IST
