Silicosis a public health emergency: Health rights leader calls for urgent national action

 

Jagdish Patel, Director of the health rights NGO Peoples Training and Research Centre, Vadodara, has called for urgent national action to address the deepening crisis of silicosis in India, terming it a public health emergency that has been continuously ignored. In an article published by the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics on June 21, 2025, Patel exposes the scale of state and institutional neglect toward occupational diseases, especially in India’s vast unorganised sector.

“Occupational health, in general and silicosis, specifically, is a public health emergency ignored for a long time as it is seen as a working-class issue not a public health problem,” writes Patel. He criticises the indifference of both the state and industry, stating, “Poor workers are a dispensable commodity, and their health is not of any importance to the state or to industry.”

Patel underscores how India, despite its ambitions to be a global economic leader, has failed to ensure basic health protections for millions of workers exposed to hazardous conditions. “We have no data on the burden of disease,” he notes. “Not only do we not have any credible data on occupational diseases, but we do not even have reliable estimates to compare with the actual data and the progress we have made, if any.”

He particularly draws attention to the fact that India has not ratified two key international labour conventions—the ILO Occupational Health and Safety Convention, 1981 (C.155) and the Promotional Framework for Occupational Safety and Health Convention (C.187). “If ratified, we will have to revise our laws accordingly,” Patel points out, adding that both conventions now form part of the fundamental set of ILO conventions which all member states are expected to adopt.

“Having legal protection is one thing and enforcement is another,” he remarks. He warns that without ratifying these conventions, India’s occupational health framework will remain fragmented, weak and largely unenforceable—especially as the new OSH Code, 2020 narrows legal coverage by raising the threshold of applicability to units employing 20 or more workers, thereby excluding millions of those most vulnerable.

Patel further notes that while a National Policy on Safety, Health and Environment at Workplace was announced in 2009, it remains largely on paper. “Prevention is an integral part of economic activities... but this has remained only on paper,” he says, calling for a renewed commitment to worker health as a pillar of national development.

Highlighting how widespread the problem of silicosis is, Patel points to various states and industrial zones—Khambhat, Morbi, Than, Godhra, and Kadi in Gujarat; sandstone mining in Rajasthan; glass factories in West Bengal; mining zones in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Madhya Pradesh. He says the disease also affects family members of workers exposed to silica dust, especially when employers house them inside factory premises. “There is no law prohibiting them from providing accommodation for workers and their families inside the factory premises,” he writes, citing a case of a woman in Morbi who contracted silicosis simply by living on-site.

Despite Supreme Court directions in a 2006 PIL and multiple NHRC reports, most Indian states continue to ignore the silicosis crisis. “Only a handful of states — Gujarat, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Delhi and Madhya Pradesh — have reported silicosis in their states. There are sporadic reports from Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir and Odisha, but no reports from states like Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala or Bihar.”

Patel concludes with a sobering observation: “These are not election issues, and no political party can be influenced to take them up.” His article is a powerful indictment of the systemic failure to protect the health of Indian workers and a call to align national laws with international labour standards India has so far chosen not to ratify.