Ask a room of Indian manufacturers which safety statute governed their working lives for three quarters of a century and the answer comes back without hesitation: the Factories Act 1948. Ask the same room a harder question, which premises the Act actually reached, and the confidence dissolves. The Factories Act 1948 was the central statute of Indian industrial safety from its commencement on 1 April 1949 until the labour codes displaced it, and everything about its operation, who had to register, who could be prosecuted, which workers could claim a canteen, a crèche, an ambulance room or a weekly holiday, turned on a single anterior question that most accounts of the Act treat as a formality. Was the premises a factory? That question was answered not by examining what the premises did, how dangerous its processes were or how likely its workers were to be hurt, but by counting heads and asking whether power was used. Ten workers with power, twenty without: cross either line and the full weight of the statute landed. Stay below both and almost none of it applied, whatever was being made and however it was being made. This article is a complete account of the Act built around that design choice, because the design choice is the Act.

The argument running through what follows can be stated plainly. The Factories Act 1948 regulated by headcount, not by hazard. Its reach was determined by how many workers a premises employed and whether a manufacturing process was carried on with the aid of power, not by how dangerous the process was. The consequence, visible in every chapter of the Act and in every debate about its failure, is that a small unit handling genuinely hazardous chemicals could sit outside the statute entirely while a large, low-risk assembly operation sat squarely inside it, and no amendment, not even the extensive reconstruction that followed the Bhopal disaster of December 1984, changed that basic architecture. The 1987 amendment wrote an entire chapter on hazardous processes into the Act, imposed disclosure duties that reached beyond the factory gate to the general public living nearby, and multiplied the penalties many times over. It did all of that inside the same definitional fence. A reader who understands the fence understands the Act: why its protections were real for the workers they reached, why so much of Indian manufacturing was never reached at all, why the inspectorate could be simultaneously intrusive and ineffective, and why the successor code’s most consequential single change was to move the fence outward by doubling the numbers.

The article proceeds as a statute pillar should. It sets out what existed before 1948 and why it was judged inadequate, then the structure of the Act as enacted. It takes the factory definition apart piece by piece, because the definition is where the Act’s real scope hides. It examines the occupier, the person the Act makes answerable for everything inside the gate, and the contested deeming provision that fixes that answerability on a director of the owning company. It works through the health, safety, hazardous processes and welfare chapters in connected prose, then the working-hours code, the protections for women and young persons, and annual leave with wages. It then turns to enforcement and penalties, the judicial treatment of the definition and of occupier liability, the amendment arc from 1976 and 1987 through the lapsed bills of the 2010s, and the succession by the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code of 2020, which repealed the Act when the labour codes were brought into force on 21 November 2025, subject to savings that keep earlier rules and licences alive through the transition. The closing sections give the two serious critiques of the Act, the one that calls it prescriptive and outdated and the one that calls its enforcement the real failure, and state a verdict on each.

What existed before the Factories Act 1948, and why it was replaced

Factory legislation in India began in the nineteenth century, with a first Factories Act in 1881 addressed mainly to the textile mills of Bombay and to the employment of children, followed by further Acts in 1891, 1911 and 1922, each widening the coverage and tightening the hours provisions a step at a time. The statute the 1948 Act directly replaced was the Factories Act 1934, enacted after the Royal Commission on Labour, whose report at the start of that decade had documented the conditions of industrial workers and recommended a consolidated and strengthened factory law. The 1934 Act was a serious statute for its time. It distinguished seasonal from perennial factories, regulated hours, and carried the framework of health and safety provisions that the later Act inherited. But by the 1940s the official view, recorded in the Statement of Objects and Reasons of the Bill that became the 1948 Act and repeated by the Supreme Court when the Act’s validity and meaning came before it, was that experience of the 1934 Act had exposed defects and weaknesses that hampered its effective administration, and that its provisions on safety, health and welfare were inadequate and unsatisfactory for a country whose industrial activity was large and growing.

The Labour Investigation Committee, appointed in 1944 under the chairmanship of D. V. Rege and reporting in 1946, supplied much of the factual foundation for wholesale revision: its enquiries documented the gap between the law on paper and conditions on factory floors, and the direction of its thinking was toward extending protective provisions to the large number of smaller industrial establishments that the earlier law did not reach. The drafting of the 1948 Act also drew on the model of the British Factories Act 1937, which had consolidated factory law in the United Kingdom around general duties on health, safety and welfare rather than a patchwork of trade-specific rules. The Indian Act followed that architecture closely: general chapters on health, safety and welfare applicable to every factory, a working-hours code, special provisions for young persons, and a penalty chapter, all hung on a definition of the premises to which the whole scheme applied.

The result was the Factories Act 1948, Act 63 of 1948, which received assent on 23 September 1948 and came into force on 1 April 1949, extending to the whole of India. Its long title states its method honestly: an Act to consolidate and amend the law regulating labour in factories. Section 120 repealed the 1934 Act and saved things done under it. What the consolidation produced was a statute of one hundred and twenty sections arranged in chapters covering preliminary matters and definitions, the inspecting staff, health, safety, hazardous processes (a chapter that did not exist in 1948 and was inserted in 1987), welfare, working hours of adults, employment of young persons, annual leave with wages, special provisions, penalties and procedure, and supplemental provisions, with three schedules attached. The First Schedule lists industries involving hazardous processes, the Second Schedule prescribes permissible levels of exposure to chemical and toxic substances in manufacturing processes, and the Third Schedule lists notifiable diseases. The schedules matter more than their position at the back of the Act suggests, because two of the three exist only because of the 1987 amendment, and the First Schedule is where the Act keeps its list of the processes it considers dangerous, a list that operates, as this article will show, only on premises that have already passed the headcount test.

Administration of the Act was divided in a way that shaped everything about its enforcement. The Act is a central statute, but it is administered by the state governments through their factory inspectorates, headed in each state by a Chief Inspector of Factories, with the central government’s Directorate General Factory Advice Service and Labour Institutes advising on administration and coordinating inspection practice. Rule-making power is shared in form but sits largely with the states, which made the detailed rules under the Act, including the forms, fees and technical standards that occupied much of the occupier’s compliance life. Labour, including factory conditions, sits in the Concurrent List of the Seventh Schedule, so both Parliament and the state legislatures are competent, and states were able to amend the Act for their own territories with the President’s assent, a power several states used in the 2010s to raise the very thresholds this article is about. The central text described here is therefore the national template, and at any given point the threshold and some standards applicable in a particular state could differ from it, a qualification that matters for the definition in particular and is taken up below.

The architecture: general duties hung on a definition

The structure of the Act repays attention because its logic is unusual. Parliament did not enact a general duty to run a safe workplace and leave the rest to case law. Nor did it regulate process by process. It did three things. First, it defined the premises to which the Act applies, using the headcount-and-power test in Section 2(m), together with the supporting definitions of “manufacturing process” in Section 2(k) and “worker” in Section 2(l). Secondly, it imposed on the occupier of every factory so defined a long list of specific obligations, chapter by chapter, most of them drafted as commands about physical arrangements: fence this machinery, whitewash these walls at these intervals, provide this many first-aid boxes per hundred and fifty workers, build a canteen when the workforce crosses two hundred and fifty. Thirdly, it attached further obligations at further headcounts inside that covered population, so that the Act reads as a ladder of thresholds: the definition lets a premises in at ten or twenty workers, and then canteens, rest rooms, crèches, welfare officers, ambulance rooms and safety officers each switch on at their own higher numbers. The findable artifact of this article, set out further below, is that ladder laid out in one table against the corresponding position under the successor code.

Two general provisions discipline the whole scheme. Section 7A, inserted by the 1987 amendment, states the general duties of the occupier: so far as is reasonably practicable, the occupier must ensure the health, safety and welfare of all workers while they are at work in the factory. The section spells out what that duty includes: the provision and maintenance of plant and systems of work that are safe and without risks to health; arrangements for ensuring safety and absence of risks to health in connection with the use, handling, storage and transport of articles and substances; the provision of the information, instruction, training and supervision necessary to ensure health and safety; the maintenance of the place of work in a condition that is safe and without risks to health, with safe means of access and egress; and the provision, maintenance and monitoring of a working environment that is safe, without risks to health and adequate as regards facilities and arrangements for welfare. Section 7B, inserted at the same time, extends a parallel general duty to persons who design, manufacture, import or supply articles and substances for use in factories, requiring them, so far as is reasonably practicable, to ensure the article is designed and constructed so as to be safe when properly used, to carry out the necessary testing and examination, and to provide adequate information about the use for which the article was designed and the conditions necessary for its safe use. These two sections are the closest the Act comes to the modern style of safety legislation, duty-based rather than specification-based, and it is telling that they arrived only in 1987, grafted onto a body of detailed rules written in 1948. Much of the argument about the Act’s character, taken up in the assessment below, is an argument about which of these two layers, the 1948 specifications or the 1987 duties, should have been the model for what replaced it.

The definition that decides everything: Section 2(m)

Section 2(m) provides that “factory” means any premises including the precincts thereof whereon ten or more workers are working, or were working on any day of the preceding twelve months, and in any part of which a manufacturing process is being carried on with the aid of power, or is ordinarily so carried on; or whereon twenty or more workers are working, or were working on any day of the preceding twelve months, and in any part of which a manufacturing process is being carried on without the aid of power, or is ordinarily so carried on. The definition excludes a mine subject to the Mines Act 1952, a mobile unit belonging to the armed forces of the Union, a railway running shed, and a hotel, restaurant or eating place. Every element of that sentence does work, and several of them decide real cases.

Start with the threshold itself. The test is not the number of workers on the payroll, the number employed on the day of an inspection, or the average over a season. It is whether ten or more workers (with power) or twenty or more (without) are working, or were working on any single day within the preceding twelve months. A premises that crosses the line once is a factory, and the obligations attach. An Explanation to the clause requires that all workers in different groups and relays in a day be counted together, so an employer cannot defeat the definition by splitting one workforce into shifts. The twelve-month look-back was not in the Act as first enacted in quite this form: as passed in 1948 the definition spoke of workers working on the premises, and the Factories (Amendment) Act 1976, Act 94 of 1976, recast the clause to add the look-back across the preceding twelve months, which had the effect of holding premises inside the definition through seasonal troughs and temporary reductions rather than letting coverage flicker on and off with the daily headcount. The same 1976 amendment rewrote the definition of “worker” and made other changes traced below. The numbers themselves, ten and twenty, survived every amendment of the central Act from 1948 onwards. They were doubled only when the successor code replaced the definition altogether, and in the meantime they were raised in several states by state amendment, which is why the bare numbers always needed a territorial qualification.

The second element is the manufacturing process, defined in Section 2(k) in deliberately wide terms. A manufacturing process includes making, altering, repairing, ornamenting, finishing, packing, oiling, washing, cleaning, breaking up, demolishing, or otherwise treating or adapting any article or substance with a view to its use, sale, transport, delivery or disposal; pumping oil, water, sewage or any other substance; generating, transforming or transmitting power; composing types for printing by letterpress, lithography, photogravure or other similar processes, and book binding; constructing, reconstructing, repairing, refitting, finishing or breaking up ships or vessels; and, by an addition made in 1976, preserving or storing any article in cold storage. Two features of this definition explain its reach. The phrase “otherwise treating or adapting” is a sweep-up that courts read broadly, and “packing” and “washing” and “cleaning” bring within the definition premises whose activity is preparatory or ancillary to manufacture elsewhere. The second Explanation to Section 2(m), added later, cuts the other way for one class of premises: the mere installation of an electronic data processing unit or a computer unit does not make premises a factory if no manufacturing process is carried on there. The definition is therefore about physical transformation and handling of articles, not about the label the establishment gives itself, and a warehouse that packs, a workshop that repairs, a cold storage that preserves, and a generating station that produces power can each be a factory while a larger office cannot.

The third element is the worker, defined in Section 2(l) as a person employed, directly or by or through any agency including a contractor, with or without the knowledge of the principal employer, whether for remuneration or not, in any manufacturing process, or in cleaning any part of the machinery or premises used for a manufacturing process, or in any other kind of work incidental to or connected with the manufacturing process or the subject of it; members of the armed forces of the Union are excluded. The breadth of this definition is one of the 1948 Act’s most consequential features. Because a person working through a contractor counts both as a worker and toward the headcount, an occupier cannot shrink the premises below the statutory threshold by outsourcing the work to a contractor’s gang standing on the same floor, nor claim that the protective chapters do not reach the people actually exposed to the machines. The words “whether for remuneration or not” carry the definition further still, to persons working without wages in the process. The 1976 amendment settled this breadth into the text by substituting the present wording of the clause, replacing a formulation tied more closely to a contract of employment with the agency-inclusive version.

The fourth element is “premises including the precincts thereof”, and it did more work than its modesty suggests. The Supreme Court’s reading, in Ardeshir H. Bhiwandiwala v State of Bombay, decided in 1961, was that premises is not confined to buildings: open land on which salt was manufactured by the evaporation of sea water could be a factory, since the definition requires a manufacturing process carried on in some part of defined premises, not under a roof. The point generalises: the Act looks to a place where the process is carried on and workers are employed in it, and the enclosure question goes to whether the land is sufficiently identified and used for the process, not to whether it has walls.

What the definition leaves out is as significant as what it takes in, and this is the analytical heart of the article. Coverage requires the conjunction of three things: premises, a manufacturing process, and the threshold headcount with or without power. A unit employing nine workers with power, however dangerous its chemistry, is not a factory, and none of the Act applies to it: no licensing, no inspector’s right of entry under this Act, no fencing duty, no leave entitlement, no Chapter IVA disclosure duty. A hazardous process carried on by eight workers is, for the purposes of this statute, invisible. Conversely, a unit employing two hundred workers on low-risk assembly is a factory in full, with every chapter engaged and every threshold inside the Act quickly passed. Defenders of the design make a real administrative point: a headcount test is objective, cheap to apply and hard to dispute, whereas a hazard test would require the state to classify and reclassify processes unit by unit and litigate the classification in every doubtful case, and the Act does contain correctives, Section 85 above all, allowing the state to pull smaller premises in by notification. Critics answer that the correctives were sparingly used and discretionary where the exclusion was automatic and total, and that the Indian manufacturing structure, dominated by very small units, meant the automatic exclusion governed the majority case. Both points are true, and the tension between them is the Act’s permanent condition. It should also be recorded that the threshold operates on the whole of Indian manufacturing as it is actually organised: a great part of manufacturing employment has always been in units below the factory threshold, in the household and tiny-workshop sector that other statutes, on shops and establishments and on specific trades, reached only partially or not at all. The Factories Act protected, in the main, the organised factory workforce, and its definition drew that boundary.

When the threshold is counted, who counts as a worker?

A worker, under Section 2(l), is a person employed, directly or by or through any agency including a contractor, in any manufacturing process, or in cleaning any part of the machinery or premises used for it, or in any other kind of work incidental to or connected with that process.

Three consequences follow. Employment through a contractor counts, so the principal employer’s headcount is not reduced by outsourcing the process itself. Employment whether for wages or not counts, so an unpaid helper on the process is a worker for the threshold, though the wage chapters will have nothing to pay him. And Section 2(m) directs that all the workers in the different groups and relays in a day are counted together, so a unit cannot halve its count by splitting the day into shifts. Members of the armed forces of the Union are the definition’s one express exclusion from the term.

The counting rules decide who is inside the fence; Section 85 is the Act’s answer for the unit outside it. Section 85 empowers the state government, by notification in the Official Gazette, to declare that all or any of the provisions of the Act shall apply to a place where a manufacturing process is carried on, notwithstanding that the number of workers is below the Section 2(m) limits, and the occupier of a place so notified is treated as the occupier of a factory for the purposes of the Act. The one exclusion is a place where the manufacturing process is carried on by the occupier only with the aid of his family. Section 85 is therefore the statute’s own answer to its definitional fence: coverage below the threshold exists, but as an act of executive grace, unit by unit or class by class, and not as a matter of right. How much of the small-unit sector was ever pulled in by notification depended on the energy and priorities of each state government, and the historical record is of a power used for specific trades and exposures, such as beedi rolling and certain chemical processes in some states, rather than as a general extension of factory law to small manufacturing. The distinction matters when the Act’s coverage is debated, because the existence of Section 85 is sometimes deployed as if it dissolved the threshold problem. It does not; it records that Parliament saw the problem and chose a discretionary remedy for it.

Counting the factory: departments, seasons and the states

The threshold test looks mechanical, and in most cases it is, but three features of the Act’s scheme complicate the counting and belong in a pillar account. The first is Section 4, the power to declare what counts as one factory. The state government may, on the application of the occupier or of its own motion, after making such inquiry as it thinks fit, declare by notification in the Official Gazette that different departments or branches of a factory shall be treated as separate factories, or that two or more factories shall be treated as a single factory, for all or any of the purposes of the Act. The power cuts in both directions: it can split a sprawling establishment so that a department’s obligations are assessed on its own worker strength, and it can aggregate nominally separate units on contiguous premises so that a fragmentation undertaken to stay below a threshold fails. Because the welfare ladder and the definition itself both turn on counts, Section 4 is the quiet provision that decides many borderline cases before any chapter is opened.

The second complication is seasonal and intermittent working. The 1948 Act, unlike the earlier law, does not maintain a separate category of seasonal factory with relaxed standards; a sugar factory crushing for a season or a gin working for a few months is a factory on the same terms as a year-round plant while it works. The twelve-month look-back in Section 2(m) accommodates intermittency from the other side: a unit that employed ten or more workers with power on any day of the preceding twelve months remains a factory through a slack period, so that coverage cannot be shed by a quiet month. Between them, the two choices explain a good deal of the register’s stability: factories rarely fall off the register by accident of season, and Inspectors treat entry onto it as durable until a formal change of circumstances.

The third complication is federal. Labour welfare is a subject in the Concurrent List of the Seventh Schedule, so Parliament and the state legislatures both legislate on factories, and a state amendment to the central Act that is repugnant to it requires the President’s assent under Article 254 of the Constitution to prevail within that state. States used that route repeatedly under the Act, most on rule-level detail, but the consequential state departures were definitional: Rajasthan’s factories amendment of 2014 raised the coverage threshold within that state to twenty workers with power and forty without, and it was among the measures most debated in the labour law argument of that period, with other states, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Haryana among them, enacting analogous threshold amendments in the years that followed. The central Act’s ten and twenty therefore described the default position, not the uniform one, and the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code’s decision to set twenty and forty nationally, while preserving any different state threshold until the state legislature amends it, is best understood as the centre adopting, with a saving, the number the states had already chosen. A reader determining whether a particular unit is or was a factory must therefore ask the question twice: once under the central text and once under the amendments in force in the state where the premises stand.

One further power belongs to this part of the scheme. Section 5 empowers the state government, where a public emergency exists, to exempt any factory or class of factories from all or any of the provisions of the Act, other than the prohibition on employing young children in Section 67, by notification, for a period not exceeding three months at a time. The power was sparingly used, and its presence in the Act is a reminder that the 1948 Parliament, legislating within living memory of wartime factory control, kept an emergency release in the text while fencing it with a short fuse and a single non-derogable provision: even an emergency could not authorise the employment of a child under fourteen.

The occupier: the person the Act holds answerable

Every obligation in the Act is addressed to someone, and the someone is the occupier. Section 2(n) defines the occupier of a factory as the person who has ultimate control over the affairs of the factory. The definition then uses deeming provisos for the cases in which ultimate control is legally diffuse. In the case of a firm or other association of individuals, any one of the individual partners or members is deemed to be the occupier. In the case of a company, any one of the directors is deemed to be the occupier. In the case of a factory owned or controlled by the Central Government, a state government or a local authority, the person or persons appointed to manage the affairs of the factory are deemed to be the occupier. A separate provision deals with ships in dry dock, deeming the dock owner and, for particular purposes, the ship’s owner or master to be occupier of the relevant premises. The manager, by contrast, is the person appointed to manage the factory day to day under Section 7’s arrangements; the manager carries many operational duties and is joined with the occupier as a defendant by the penalty chapter, but the manager is not the person on whom the Act’s systemic obligations rest, and confusing the two is the single most common error in popular writing about the Act. The occupier licenses the factory, gives the statutory notices, owes the Section 7A general duty, makes the Chapter IVA disclosures, and is prosecuted when the fence is missing.

The procedural incidents of the office show its weight. Under Section 6, no factory may be established or carried on except under a licence granted or renewed by the Chief Inspector or the prescribed authority, and the construction or extension of a factory, or the taking into use of a building as a factory, requires prior written approval of the site and of the plans, with state rules prescribing the licensing fees, the period of validity and the conditions. Under Section 7, the occupier must send to the Chief Inspector a written notice, at least fifteen days before beginning to occupy or use any premises as a factory, containing the prescribed particulars of the factory, its process, its power and its workforce, with further notices required on changes including the appointment of a manager, and a notice before the factory closes. These provisions make the occupier the state’s counterpart for the factory: the person whose name is on the licence and the notices is the person the inspectorate deals with, inspects, directs and, in the end, prosecutes.

The deeming provision for companies created the Act’s most contested piece of doctrine, because it fixes criminal answerability on a director who may sit in a distant head office and have no operational connection with the premises where an offence occurred. Before 1987, the proviso spoke differently, and practice had developed under which a company could nominate as occupier a person with ultimate control of the factory’s affairs who was not a director: the John Donald Mackenzie line of authority, discussed in the later Supreme Court judgment, treated a senior officer in actual control of the factory as capable of being the occupier even without a board seat. The 1987 amendment recast the proviso in mandatory terms, providing that in the case of a company any one of the directors shall be deemed to be the occupier. The Supreme Court settled the meaning of the amended proviso in J. K. Industries Ltd. v Chief Inspector of Factories and Boilers, decided on 25 September 1996. The companies before the Court had challenged a direction of the Chief Inspector that only a director could be shown as occupier for licensing purposes, and had attacked the proviso as unconstitutional and as exceeding the main provision. The Court rejected both arguments. It held that after the 1987 amendment a company cannot nominate any employee or officer, however senior, as occupier; the occupier must necessarily be one of its directors, notified for the purposes of the Act, and that reading applies wherever the word occupier is used in the Act and not only for the purposes of Sections 7 and 7A. On the constitutional challenge, the Court upheld the proviso, reasoning from Parliament’s stated experience: directors had been escaping liability for breaches in factories by putting forward an employee as occupier who would take the penalty in their place, and the amendment was directed precisely at that device, making one of the directors responsible so that the board would be vigilant about the duties the Act imposes.

The honest assessment of this doctrine requires both halves to be stated at strength, as the brief for this article demands. The case for the deeming provision is deterrence located where decisions are made. Factory safety fails, very often, not because a floor-level manager is wicked but because safety expenditure is deferred at budget level, maintenance is postponed, and production targets are set without reference to machine guarding or exposure limits. A rule that makes a named director criminally answerable for the state of the factory forces the subject onto the board’s agenda in a way that a fine on the company, priced into operations, does not. The Supreme Court’s reasoning in J. K. Industries rests on documented legislative experience of the shield device, not on theory, and the provision does not convict the director automatically of every lapse: the offence still has to be proved, the Act contains the Section 101 mechanism discussed below, and the courts retain their ordinary powers over sentence. The case against is fairness at the point of prosecution. A large company may run dozens of factories; the deemed occupier is one director for each, selected by the company and notified, and prosecutions following accidents have repeatedly been launched against directors whose connection with the particular factory’s daily operations was nominal, consuming years in quashing proceedings before the High Courts, in which the question whether the prosecution discloses any personal default beyond the deemed status is litigated case by case. A doctrine designed to pierce a shield can, in operation, become a levy on office rather than on fault. The balance between deterrence and fairness here is genuinely difficult, because both sides are describing real cases: the director who used a nominee as a shield is real, and the non-executive director pursued for a lapse in a plant he had never visited is real. What can be said with confidence is that the 1987 Parliament, legislating in the shadow of Bhopal, chose deterrence deliberately, and the Supreme Court, with the legislative record before it, declined to undo that choice.

Section 101 provides the Act’s internal corrective to deemed answerability. Where the occupier or manager is charged with an offence under the Act, he is entitled, on complaint duly made and on giving the prosecution three clear days’ notice, to have another person whom he charges as the actual offender brought before the court. If, after the offence is proved, the occupier or manager shows that he used all due diligence to enforce the execution of the Act and that the other person committed the offence without his knowledge, consent or connivance, the other person is convicted and the occupier or manager is discharged from liability. The provision is the Act’s internal answer to the fairness objection: deemed answerability is a starting point, not an irrebuttable conviction, and the occupier who can prove both his own diligence and another’s actual commission of the offence has a statutory exit. Its limits are equally plain. The diligence burden rests on the accused occupier, the conditions are cumulative, and the defence does nothing for the occupier who was merely distant; it protects the occupier who was diligent. Courts have treated the provision as a genuine but demanding defence, which is about where a legislature balancing factory discipline against personal fault would be expected to land.

The inspecting staff and the inspector’s powers

Chapter II builds the enforcement machinery. Section 8 provides for Inspectors: the state government appoints the Chief Inspector, Additional Chief Inspectors, Joint Chief Inspectors, Deputy Chief Inspectors and Inspectors, and every Inspector is deemed a public servant. Section 9 gives the Inspector, within the local limits assigned, powers that define what factory inspection actually was: to enter, with such assistants as he thinks fit, any place which is used, or which he has reason to believe is used, as a factory; to make examination of the premises, plant, machinery, articles or substances; to inquire into any accident or dangerous occurrence; to require the production of any prescribed register or document; to seize or take copies of records relevant to an offence; to direct that premises or any part of them be left undisturbed pending examination following an accident; to take measurements and photographs and make recordings; to take samples of substances under Section 91’s procedure; and to exercise such other powers as may be prescribed. Section 10 provides for certifying surgeons, medical practitioners appointed to examine and certify the fitness of young persons for work, to exercise medical supervision where processes involve risk of illness, and to investigate cases of illness reasonably believed to be caused by the nature of a process. Around these provisions sit Section 88’s duty to report accidents and Section 89’s duty to notify specified diseases, treated in the enforcement discussion below, and the occupier’s corresponding duty to admit and assist the inspection.

The gap between this machinery on paper and its operation is a large part of the Act’s story, and it is a gap about capacity rather than design. Inspection coverage depended on the number of Inspectors a state employed relative to the number of registered factories it had to cover, on the technical depth of inspection in processes the Inspector might see once a year, and on the follow-through from inspection note to prosecution to conviction, each stage with its own attrition. The criticism that the inspectorate was too thin and too generalist to police process safety in chemical and engineering industries of growing complexity was made about the Act throughout its life, by parliamentary committees, by the National Commission on Labour, and by the press after every serious accident, and the state governments that administered the Act variously answered with specialist cells, mandatory third-party safety audits under state rules for hazardous units, and the competent-person regime for examinations of plant, which allowed recognised persons and institutions, rather than the Inspector personally, to conduct the tests, examinations and inspections the Act requires. None of this is an argument that inspection was useless: the existence of a licensing gate, a register, periodic renewal and an entry power created a baseline of formality in the organised sector that unregulated premises never had. It is an argument that the Act’s protective promise was always going to be delivered, if at all, by occupiers who complied because the system made compliance the path of least resistance, and that the inspectorate could sample, deter and prosecute but could never substitute for the occupier’s own management of risk. The Act’s designers appear to have understood this, which is why the statute’s obligations are drafted to be checkable: a fence either exists or it does not, a notice is either displayed or it is not, a register either shows the leave or it does not. The prescriptive style that later critics attacked as rigidity was, in part, an enforcement technology chosen for a thin inspectorate.

Two institutions stand behind the state inspectorates and explain the surprising uniformity of Indian factory law across states whose administrations differ widely. The first is the model rules tradition: the central government framed model Factories Rules which the states adapted, so that licence forms, examination cycles, exposure precautions and register formats converged even though each state made its own rules under Section 112. The second is the Directorate General Factory Advice Service and Labour Institutes, the technical organisation under the Union Ministry of Labour and Employment descended from the office of the Chief Adviser of Factories created in the 1940s, which advises the central and state governments and industry on safety and health in factories, runs the central and regional labour institutes, and studies the occupational health problems that the state services are too small to research alone. The Chief Inspectorate of a large industrial state is a substantial technical service in its own right; the inspectorate of a small state leans heavily on this central advice, and the Act’s standards on paper are correspondingly national while their enforcement remains, as the Act intends, a state function.

The health chapter: Sections 11 to 20

Chapter III, on health, is the oldest stratum of factory legislation in the Act, and its ten sections set the physical baseline of the factory environment. Section 11 requires every factory to be kept clean and free from effluvia from drains and privies: accumulations of dirt and refuse must be removed daily, floors of workrooms cleaned at least weekly, and walls, partitions, ceilings and staircases whitewashed or colourwashed at intervals of fourteen months, painted surfaces repainted or revarnished at intervals of five years, with the dates of these operations entered in a prescribed register. Section 12 requires effective arrangements for the disposal of wastes and effluents arising from the manufacturing process, in accordance with arrangements approved by the prescribed authority. Section 13 requires effective and suitable provision for securing and maintaining adequate ventilation by the circulation of fresh air in every workroom, and for rendering harmless, so far as practicable, the temperature consequences of any process, with standards for temperature and humidity that state rules elaborate: walls and roofs must be of materials and design such that the temperature does not rise beyond what the structure can keep reasonable, and thermometers must be maintained at prescribed points where state rules require. Section 14 deals with dust and fume: where a process gives off dust, fume or other impurity likely to be injurious or offensive to workers, effective measures must prevent its inhalation and accumulation, exhaust appliances must be applied as near as possible to the point of origin, and no stationary internal combustion engine may be operated unless its exhaust is conducted into the open air, nor any internal combustion engine in a room unless provision prevents fumes accumulating to a dangerous concentration.

Section 15 regulates artificial humidification, empowering state rules on the standards of humidification, the methods used, tests and records, and requiring that the water used be drinking water or water purified to the prescribed standard. Section 16 prohibits overcrowding: no room in a factory may be overcrowded to an extent injurious to the health of the workers, and the Act fixes the space per worker, not less than nine point nine cubic metres for factories in existence at the Act’s commencement and fourteen point two cubic metres for factories built afterwards, counting no space more than four point two metres above the floor.

How much space must each worker have in a workroom?

Section 16 requires that every workroom provide at least 14.2 cubic metres of space for each worker employed there, in factories built after the Act commenced, and 9.9 cubic metres in older factories, with any space more than 4.2 metres above the floor left out of the computation.

The figures are the health chapter in miniature: a duty expressed as a measurement, auditable with a tape and a headcount, generous by the standards of the workshops the Rege Committee had inspected and modest by the standards of the modern plants that followed. An Inspector checking overcrowding does not argue about health in the abstract; he multiplies the room’s qualifying volume, divides by the standard, and compares the result with the register of workers.

Section 17 requires sufficient and suitable lighting, natural or artificial or both, in every part of the factory where workers work or pass, with glazed windows and skylights kept clean and precautions against glare and the formation of shadows to an extent that causes eye strain or risks accident. Section 18 requires a sufficient supply of wholesome drinking water at suitable points conveniently situated for all workers, distinctly marked as drinking water in a language understood by the majority, not within a prescribed distance of washing places, latrines or sources of contamination, and, where more than two hundred and fifty workers are ordinarily employed, provision for cooling the drinking water during hot weather. Section 19 requires sufficient latrine and urinal accommodation of the prescribed type, separately for male and female workers, conveniently situated, lighted, ventilated, kept clean and swept by sweepers, with sanitary arrangements maintained to the standard state rules prescribe. Section 20 requires a sufficient number of spittoons to be provided in convenient places and maintained in a clean and hygienic condition, a provision whose presence in the Act dates the chapter to an era of betel and tobacco, and whose enforcement by fine for spitting elsewhere completes the picture of a chapter concerned with the mundane physical decencies of industrial life.

Read together, the health chapter is environmental regulation at the scale of the room. Its method is the standard: not “keep the factory healthy” but a whitewash interval, a cubic-metre figure, a marked water point. That method has the strengths and weaknesses of the whole 1948 layer. It is enforceable by inspection with a tape measure and a register, and generations of workers owed real improvements in air, water, light and sanitation to its unglamorous commands. It is also frozen at the technical understanding of its drafting era, amended in detail by state rules rather than in the central text, and it treats the worker’s environment as a set of amenities rather than as an exposure regime, which is precisely the limitation the hazardous processes chapter had to correct for chemical risk nearly forty years later.

The safety chapter: Sections 21 to 41

Chapter IV is the core of the Act for most readers, and the longest of its chapters. Section 21 requires fencing of machinery: every part of a prime mover, every flywheel connected to it, every part of transmission machinery, every dangerous part of other machinery specified or found dangerous, and the stock-bar of a machine tool, must be securely fenced unless it is in such a position or of such construction as to be as safe to every person employed as it would be if securely fenced. Section 22 governs work on or near machinery in motion: examination of machinery in motion, lubrication and adjustment of belts may be done only by a specially trained adult male worker wearing tight-fitting clothing provided by the occupier, whose name is entered in the prescribed register; no woman or young person may be allowed to clean, lubricate or adjust any part of a prime mover or transmission machinery while it is in motion, or any part of a machine where the operation would expose them to risk of injury from its moving parts. Section 23 restricts the employment of young persons on dangerous machines: a young person may work on a machine specified by state rules as dangerous only if fully instructed as to the dangers and the precautions to be observed and either trained sufficiently or placed under the adequate supervision of a person with thorough knowledge and experience of the machine. Section 24 requires suitable striking gear or other efficient mechanical appliances to move driving belts on and off fast and loose pulleys, which must be maintained and securely placed, and prohibits driving belts, when not in use, from resting or riding on moving shafts. Section 25 requires every self-acting machine, and the material carried by it, to be kept at a prescribed clearance, ordinarily not less than forty-five centimetres, from any fixed structure that is not part of the machine. Section 26 requires all new machinery driven by power to have its screws, bolts and keys on revolving shafts, spindles, wheels and pinions sunk, encased or otherwise effectively guarded, and all spur, worm and other toothed or friction gearing not requiring frequent adjustment while in motion to be completely encased unless safely located. Section 27 prohibits the employment of women and children near a cotton-opener, except in the feed-end process separated by a partition extending to the roof or statutory height.

Sections 28 to 33 deal with the apparatus of lifting, pressure and access. Section 28 requires hoists and lifts to be of good mechanical construction and sound material, properly maintained, thoroughly examined by a competent person at least once every six months with the results entered in a register, and enclosed and protected by gates, with the maximum safe working load plainly marked and no greater load carried. Section 29 applies the same regime to lifting machines, chains, ropes and lifting tackles, including periodic thorough examination and annealing of chains at prescribed intervals, and Section 30 requires revolving machinery to have a permanent notice indicating the maximum safe working peripheral speed of each grindstone or abrasive wheel, the speed of the shaft or spindle on which it is carried and the diameter of the pulley on it, and forbids exceeding those speeds. Section 31 governs pressure plant: where any part of a plant or machinery used in a manufacturing process is operated at a pressure greater than atmospheric pressure, effective measures must ensure that the safe working pressure is not exceeded, with examinations and tests as prescribed. Section 32 requires floors, steps, stairs, passages and gangways to be of sound construction and properly maintained, free from obstructions and substances likely to cause persons to slip, with substantial handrails where necessary, and Section 33 requires pits, sumps, openings in floors and similar hazards to be securely covered or fenced.

How often must hoists, lifts and lifting machines be examined?

A hoist or lift must be thoroughly examined by a competent person at least once every six months, and lifting machines, chains, ropes and lifting tackles at least once every twelve months, with particulars of every examination entered in the prescribed register kept for inspection.

The examiner is the “competent person” of Section 2(ca), a person or institution recognised by the Chief Inspector for the purposes of the provision in question, and the examination regime is the safety chapter’s characteristic device: it does not trust the occupier’s own judgement about the machine that carries men and loads overhead, but requires a recognised outsider to examine it on a fixed cycle and to leave a register entry that an Inspector can check. A hoist or lift must also have its maximum safe working load plainly marked, its cage enclosed with gates that cannot be opened except at a landing, and its operation restricted to trained adult persons, and a lifting machine may not be loaded beyond its marked safe working load except for the purpose of a test. The register, in practice, is one of the documents an Inspector asks for first, because a gap in its dates is visible at a glance.

Sections 34 to 41 complete the chapter. Section 34 provides that no person shall be employed in any factory to lift, carry or move any load so heavy as to be likely to cause injury, with state rules empowered to prescribe maximum weights for adults, adolescents and children of each sex. Section 35 requires suitable goggles or effective screens to be provided for workers in processes specified by state rules as involving risk of injury to the eyes from particles or fragments or exposure to excessive light. Section 36 deals with dangerous fumes and gases: no person may enter any chamber, tank, vat, pit, pipe, flue or other confined space in which dangerous fumes are likely to be present to an extent that persons may be overcome, unless it is provided with a manhole or other effective means of egress of the prescribed minimum dimensions and the entry is made in compliance with the precautions the section prescribes, including certification that the space is free from dangerous fumes and the use of breathing apparatus and a belt and rope supervised from outside where certification cannot be given. Section 36A requires that no portable electric light or other electric appliance of voltage exceeding twenty-four volts be permitted inside such confined spaces, and no lamp or light other than one of flameproof construction where inflammable fumes may be present. Section 37 governs explosive or inflammable dust, gas or vapour: where a process produces dust, gas, fume or vapour of such character and extent as to be likely to explode on ignition, effective measures must prevent ignition, by enclosure of plant, removal or prevention of accumulations, exclusion or effective enclosure of sources of ignition, or plant construction and venting designed to withstand or relieve pressure, and the section restricts the opening of parts of pressurised plant and welding and soldering operations on plant containing explosive substances. Section 38 prescribes precautions in case of fire: every factory must be provided with prescribed means of escape in case of fire, fire exits must not be locked or fastened so that they cannot be opened immediately from inside, windows, doors and other exits affording means of escape must be distinctively marked in red letters in a language understood by the majority of workers, an effective and clearly audible means of giving warning in case of fire must be provided, workers must be familiarised with the means of escape and trained in the routine to be followed, and the Inspector may require additional measures where he considers the existing provision inadequate.

Section 39 empowers the Inspector, where any part of the ways, works, machinery or plant in a factory is in a condition that is dangerous to human life or safety, or conditions of work contravene the Act in a way that exposes workers to serious risk, to require the occupier to furnish specifications of the parts alleged to be dangerous and to have tests made and their results reported. Section 40 extends the power: where a building or part of a building, or any part of the ways, machinery or plant is dangerous to human life or safety, the Inspector may serve on the occupier an order in writing prohibiting the use of that part until it has been remedied; Section 40A adds the duty to maintain buildings in a safe condition and Section 40B requires safety officers. Section 40B obliges the occupier, in every factory where one thousand or more workers are ordinarily employed, and in every factory where in the opinion of the state government the manufacturing process involves any risk of bodily injury, poisoning or disease or any other hazard to health, to employ such number of safety officers as the state government directs, with the qualifications, duties and conditions of service prescribed. Section 41, finally, preserves the power of the state government to make rules supplementing the chapter for any factory or class of factories. There is a pattern in the chapter’s drafting that is worth naming, because it explains both its durability and the critique of it: the Act does not trust the occupier’s engineering judgment, so it converts engineering practice into legal commands with examination cycles, registers and notices attached, and reserves to the Inspector the power to stop a particular part of the factory rather than the whole, which is a more usable, and therefore more credible, sanction than closure.

The hazardous processes chapter: what Bhopal wrote into the Act

On the night of 2 and 3 December 1984, methyl isocyanate gas escaped from the pesticide plant of Union Carbide India Limited at Bhopal. The legal consequences of that night spread across many statutes and a famous settlement, and they are treated in the environmental cluster of this series and in the article that owns the disaster’s legislative record. This article’s concern is narrower: what the disaster did to the Factories Act. The Factories (Amendment) Act 1987, Act 20 of 1987, which took effect on 1 December 1987, was Parliament’s answer inside factory law, and it is the clearest example in Indian legislative history of a statute rewritten by a catastrophe. Its centrepiece was the insertion of Chapter IVA, Sections 41A to 41H, headed “Provisions relating to hazardous processes”, together with the First Schedule listing the industries involving hazardous processes to which the chapter fastens, the definition of “hazardous process” in Section 2(cb), the general duties in Sections 7A and 7B, a special penalty in Section 96A, and the recasting of the general penalty in Section 92 and of the occupier proviso in Section 2(n) that were discussed above. The chapter applies to every factory in which a hazardous process takes place, a hazardous process being any process or activity in relation to an industry specified in the First Schedule where, unless special care is taken, the raw materials used in it or the intermediate or finished products, bye-products, wastes or effluents of it would cause material impairment of the health of the persons engaged in or connected with it, or result in pollution of the general environment.

Section 41A requires Site Appraisal Committees. The state government must constitute such a committee, chaired by the Chief Inspector with members drawn from the state pollution control and public health authorities, the local authority, water supply and town planning, and experts, to examine applications for the establishment or expansion of factories involving a hazardous process and advise the state government on the initial location of such a factory and on applications for its expansion. Section 41B imposes compulsory disclosure of information by the occupier, and its reach is the chapter’s most distinctive feature: the occupier of every factory involving a hazardous process must disclose, in the prescribed manner, all information regarding dangers, including health hazards and the measures to overcome them arising from exposure to or handling of materials and substances in manufacture, transportation, storage and other processes, not only to the workers employed in the factory and to the Chief Inspector, but also to the local authority within whose jurisdiction the factory is situated and to the general public living in the vicinity. At the time of registration the occupier must lay down a detailed policy on the health and safety of the workers and intimate it to the Chief Inspector and the local authority, must inform them of changes, must include accurate information about the quantity, specifications and characteristics of wastes and the manner of their disposal, and must, with the approval of the Chief Inspector, draw up an on-site emergency plan and detailed disaster control measures for the factory and make the safety measures required in the event of an accident known to the workers and to the public in the vicinity. The pre-1987 Act had treated information about process danger as a matter between the factory and its inspector. Section 41B treats the neighbourhood as entitled to know, which is a direct institutional lesson drawn from a disaster in which the population around the plant did not know what was stored inside it or what to do when it escaped.

Section 41C states the specific responsibility of the occupier in relation to hazardous processes: to maintain accurate and up-to-date health records and medical records of workers exposed to chemical, toxic or other harmful substances in the manufacturing process, to provide for the medical examination of such workers at prescribed intervals and on ceasing to be engaged in the process, and to appoint persons with the prescribed qualifications and experience to supervise the handling of hazardous substances. Section 41D empowers the Central Government to appoint an Inquiry Committee to inquire into the standards of health and safety observed in a factory or class of factories, and Section 41E empowers it, on the report of such a committee or otherwise, to direct the state government to lay down emergency standards for enforcement of suitable standards in respect of hazardous processes, applying until rules are made. Section 41F fixes permissible limits of exposure of chemical and toxic substances in manufacturing processes in the various industries, by reference to the Second Schedule, and empowers the Central Government, on the recommendation of the Directorate General Factory Advice Service and Labour Institutes, to revise those limits. Section 41G requires workers’ participation in safety management: the occupier in every factory where a hazardous process takes place, or where hazardous substances are used or handled, must set up a Safety Committee consisting of equal numbers of representatives of workers and management, to promote cooperation between them in maintaining proper safety and health at work and to review periodically the measures taken in that behalf. Section 41H gives workers the right to warn about imminent danger: where workers have reasonable apprehension that there is a likelihood of imminent danger to their lives or health due to any accident, they may bring the apprehension to the notice of the occupier, agent, manager or other person in charge directly or through their representatives in the Safety Committee, and the occupier or his officer must take immediate remedial action if satisfied about the existence of the danger and inform the Inspector forthwith of the action taken; if not satisfied, he must refer the matter to the Inspector, whose decision is final. Section 96A backs Sections 41B, 41C and 41H with the Act’s heaviest penalty: imprisonment for a term that may extend to seven years with fine that may extend to two lakh rupees, a further fine for each day of continuation after conviction, and imprisonment that may extend to ten years where the contravention continues beyond a year after conviction.

Two observations complete the account of the chapter. The first is what the chapter did not do. It improved the internal regulation of premises already inside the Act, and its duties are all addressed to the occupier of a factory, which means they fall away entirely where the premises are not a factory. A process listed in the First Schedule carried on by nine workers with power acquired none of these duties, because the threshold question precedes the hazard question in the statute’s logic. The chapter thus deepened the regulation of hazard without widening the gate through which hazardous premises enter regulation, and the tension the brief for this article identifies, regulation by headcount rather than by hazard, survived Bhopal intact. The second observation concerns the doctrine that developed alongside the chapter rather than within it. In M. C. Mehta v Union of India, decided in 1987 in the proceedings that followed the oleum gas leak from a Delhi industrial unit, the Supreme Court articulated the principle of absolute liability: an enterprise engaged in a hazardous or inherently dangerous industry owes an absolute and non-delegable duty to the community, and if harm results from its activity it must compensate under the rule of absolute liability, without the exceptions that the older English rule of strict liability had permitted. That principle belongs to the environmental and constitutional cluster, and its significance for the Factories Act is as a companion rather than a component: Parliament’s 1987 chapter addressed prevention, disclosure and participation inside the factory gate, while the Court’s doctrine addressed compensation after harm, and the two together, not either alone, constitute the legal system’s Bhopal-era settlement on industrial risk.

The welfare chapter: Sections 42 to 50

Chapter V, on welfare, converts part of the wage bargain into facilities the employer must supply, and it is here that the ladder structure of the Act is most visible, because most of its obligations attach only when the workforce crosses a stated number. Section 42 requires adequate and suitable facilities for washing to be provided and maintained for the use of workers, separately for male and female workers, conveniently accessible and kept clean. Section 43 empowers state rules requiring facilities for storing and drying clothing. Section 44 empowers state rules requiring facilities for sitting for workers obliged to work in a standing position, so that they may take advantage of opportunities for rest that occur in the course of their work. Section 45 requires first-aid appliances: at least one first-aid box or cupboard with the prescribed contents for every one hundred and fifty workers ordinarily employed, readily accessible during all working hours, each box in the charge of a responsible person who holds a certificate in first-aid treatment recognised by the state government and who is always readily available; and in every factory where more than five hundred workers are ordinarily employed, an ambulance room of the prescribed size, containing the prescribed equipment and in the charge of prescribed medical and nursing staff, must be provided. Section 46 empowers the state government to require, by notification, a canteen or canteens in any specified factory where more than two hundred and fifty workers are ordinarily employed, to be provided by the occupier and maintained for the use of the workers, run on a basis that excludes profit beyond prescribed limits and to standards covering the building, its furniture and equipment, the foodstuffs served and their prices, and the representation of workers in the management of the canteen. Section 47 requires shelters, rest rooms and a lunch room in factories where more than one hundred and fifty workers are ordinarily employed, suitably furnished and maintained with adequate ventilation and lighting and a supply of cool drinking water, where workers can eat meals brought by them. Section 48 requires a crèche: in every factory where more than thirty women workers are ordinarily employed, a suitable room or rooms must be provided and maintained for the use of children under the age of six years of those women, adequately lighted and ventilated, in clean and sanitary condition, under the charge of a woman trained in the care of children and infants, with state rules prescribing construction, equipment, creche facilities and additional facilities for the mothers’ care of their children, including, in specified factories, free milk or refreshment. Section 49 requires a welfare officer: in every factory where five hundred or more workers are ordinarily employed, the occupier must employ such number of welfare officers as may be prescribed, and state rules prescribe their qualifications, duties and conditions of service. Section 50 reserves the state government’s power to make rules supplementing the chapter.

The crèche threshold is the one place where the Act’s text and its applied position parted company over time, and it illustrates how the ladder could be altered without amending the central numbers. The Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act 2017 wrote a crèche obligation into the maternity statute for establishments with fifty or more employees, and a number of states revised their factory rules or state amendments in related directions, so that the thirty-women figure in Section 48 ceased, in many workplaces, to be the operative trigger even though the central text retained it. The episode generalises into a feature of the Act’s last decades: because the detailed standards live in state rules and cognate statutes, the applied law in a particular factory was a compound of the 1948 text, the state rules, and later social statutes, and the bare Act alone does not tell a manufacturer or a worker the whole position. That is also why the artifact below states the successor code’s position as enacted in the Code’s text and rules framework, and not as a prediction about any particular establishment.

What attaches at what headcount: the threshold ladder

The table below is the working summary of this article. Each row is an obligation under the Factories Act, the headcount at which it attaches under the central text, and the corresponding position under the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020, which is treated in full later in this article and compared with the older labour statutes in the comparison of the labour codes with the laws they replaced.

Obligation	Factories Act 1948 trigger	OSH Code 2020 position
Registration and licensing as a factory	Ten or more workers with power, twenty or more without (Section 2(m))	Twenty or more workers with power, forty or more without; single common registration, with earlier state thresholds preserved until the state amends
Hazardous process obligations (disclosure, site appraisal, emergency plan, safety committee)	Every factory carrying on a process listed in the First Schedule, with no additional headcount (Chapter IVA)	Carried into the Code’s duties framework for hazardous processes, keyed to the process rather than to a separate chapter
First-aid boxes	One box for every one hundred and fifty workers ordinarily employed (Section 45)	First-aid facilities prescribed under the Code’s welfare provisions and rules
Ambulance room	More than five hundred workers ordinarily employed (Section 45)	More than five hundred workers (Code welfare provision)
Shelters, rest rooms and lunch room	More than one hundred and fifty workers ordinarily employed (Section 47)	Rest rooms at fifty or more workers
Canteen	More than two hundred and fifty workers ordinarily employed (Section 46)	One hundred or more workers, counting contract labour
Crèche	More than thirty women workers ordinarily employed (Section 48)	More than fifty workers
Welfare officer	Five hundred or more workers ordinarily employed (Section 49)	Two hundred and fifty or more workers
Safety officer	One thousand or more workers ordinarily employed, or any factory whose process involves prescribed risk (Section 40B)	Prescribed by rules; the standard figure is five hundred workers in an ordinary factory, with a lower figure for hazardous process factories

Two readings of the ladder deserve emphasis. The first is how much of the welfare state inside the factory was rationed by size: a worker in a factory of one hundred and forty had no statutory rest room, a worker in a factory of two hundred and forty no canteen, a mother in a factory of twenty-nine women no crèche, and a workforce of four hundred and ninety no welfare officer. The ladder spared small employers costs, deliberately, and it did so by making the worker’s entitlements depend on the accident of her employer’s size. The second is the direction of travel in the successor code, which is not uniform. The Code raises the entry threshold for the entire scheme, doubling it, and so removes the smallest factories from factory law altogether, while at the same time lowering several internal thresholds, canteen from two hundred and fifty to one hundred, welfare officer from five hundred to two hundred and fifty, crèche recast at fifty workers irrespective of the women’s count. Fewer factories are covered; the factories that are covered owe more, earlier. Whether that exchange is a modernisation or a contraction is one of the live questions of the succession, and it is the same question, in new numbers, that the headcount design posed from 1948 onwards.

Working hours of adults: Sections 51 to 65

Chapter VI is a self-contained hours code for adult workers in factories, and its provisions are cumulative: a worker’s day must satisfy all of them at once. Section 51 fixes the weekly limit: no adult worker shall be required or allowed to work in a factory for more than forty-eight hours in any week. Section 52 fixes the weekly holiday: no adult worker shall be required or allowed to work on the first day of the week, that is to say Sunday, unless he has or will have a holiday for a whole day on one of the three days immediately before or after that day and the manager has delivered the prescribed notices to the Inspector and displayed them in the factory; and no substitution may result in any worker working for more than ten days consecutively without a holiday for a whole day. Section 53 entitles the worker who loses a weekly holiday by reason of an exemption or substitution to compensatory holidays of equal number within the month in which the holidays were due or the two months immediately following. Section 54 fixes the daily limit: no adult worker shall be required or allowed to work for more than nine hours in any day, subject to a power in the Chief Inspector, subject to the control of the state government, to allow a change to facilitate the change of shifts. Section 55 requires intervals for rest: the periods of work of adult workers in a factory each day must be so fixed that no period exceeds five hours and no worker works for more than five hours before he has had an interval for rest of at least half an hour; the state government or, subject to its control, the Chief Inspector may by written order exempt a factory from this requirement so that the total number of hours worked without an interval does not exceed six. Section 56 fixes the spread over: the periods of work of an adult worker in a factory must be so arranged that, inclusive of his intervals for rest, they do not spread over more than ten and a half hours in any day, though the Chief Inspector may, for reasons to be recorded in writing, increase the spread over up to twelve hours. Section 57 deals with night shifts: where a worker works on a shift which extends beyond midnight, a holiday for a whole day means, in his case, a period of twenty-four consecutive hours beginning when his shift ends, and the following day is reckoned from the commencement of the shift following his night shift. Section 58 prohibits overlapping shifts, providing that work must not be carried on by means of a system of shifts so arranged that more than one relay of workers is engaged in work of the same kind at the same time, subject to state exemption power in specified circumstances. Section 59 is the overtime provision, analysed separately below. Section 60 restricts double employment: no adult worker may work in any factory on any day on which he has already been working in another factory, save in prescribed circumstances. Sections 61 to 63 supply the transparency machinery: a notice of periods of work for adult workers, showing clearly for every day the periods during which adult workers may be required to work, must be displayed and correctly maintained in the prescribed form at the prescribed place; the occupier must maintain a register of adult workers showing the name of each worker, the nature of his work, the group and relay he belongs to, and such other particulars as may be prescribed, and the register must be available to the Inspector at all times during working hours; and Section 63 provides that no adult worker may be required or allowed to work except in accordance with the displayed notice and the register entries made beforehand.

Section 59 converts hours beyond the statutory limits into a wage entitlement. Where a worker works in a factory for more than nine hours in any day or for more than forty-eight hours in any week, he is entitled, in respect of the overtime work, to wages at the rate of twice his ordinary rate of wages. The ordinary rate of wages means the basic wages plus such allowances, including the cash equivalent of the advantage accruing through the concessional sale to workers of foodgrains and other articles, as the worker is for the time being entitled to, but does not include a bonus or wages for overtime work. Sections 64 and 65 contain the exemption powers, and it is here that the much-litigated question of quarterly overtime caps arises. Section 64 empowers the state government to make exempting rules relaxing the hours provisions, other than Section 51’s weekly limit and Section 52’s weekly holiday discipline, for specified classes of workers, such as workers engaged in work of an urgent or seasonal character, subject to conditions that include a ceiling of fifty hours of overtime for any one quarter. Section 65 empowers the state government, or subject to its control the Chief Inspector, to make exempting orders for factories with exceptionally heavy work, again subject to conditions that include that the total number of hours of overtime work in any quarter does not exceed seventy-five, that no worker works overtime for more than seven days at a stretch, and that the worker’s total weekly hours including overtime do not exceed sixty. The Factories (Amendment) Bill 2016, which proposed raising these ceilings to one hundred and one hundred and twenty-five hours respectively and passed the Lok Sabha without completing passage in the Rajya Sabha before lapsing, is examined in the amendment arc below; the caps of fifty and seventy-five are the figures the Act carried into its replacement.

The hours code interacted with everything else in the Act in ways a reader should hold together. The same worker counted toward the threshold in Section 2(m), claimed the Section 59 premium, earned leave under Chapter VIII by reference to the days he worked, and was protected by Section 60 against an employer defeating the hours limits by engaging him across two factories. The code’s rigidity was its point: unlike a duty framed in terms of reasonableness, a nine-hour day and a forty-eight-hour week either are or are not breached on the face of the register, and the register, the notice board and the Inspector’s entry power were designed as one enforcement instrument.

Women, children and adolescents: Sections 66 to 77

Chapter VII bears the heading “Employment of young persons”, and it is read with Section 66, the last section of Chapter VI, which states the further restrictions on the employment of women. Section 66 provides that no woman shall be required or allowed to work in any factory except between the hours of six in the morning and seven in the evening; the state government may by notification vary those limits for any factory or group or class of factories, but no such variation may authorise the employment of any woman between ten at night and five in the morning. It further provides that there shall be no change of shifts except after a weekly holiday or any other holiday, and that no exemption from the daily hours provision of Section 54 may be granted in respect of any woman. The provision is a protective exclusion of a familiar kind in twentieth-century labour law: it removed women from night work altogether in the covered sector, on a rationale of safety and social protection, and it had the equally familiar consequence of removing women from the better-paid rotating shifts and from whole employments organised around continuous process. Several state governments amended the position in the later decades to permit night work for women with prescribed safeguards and consent, and the successor code generalised that change, so Section 66’s absolute window is best understood as the original settlement from which the law later moved.

For young persons the Act built a graded structure on its own definitions. Section 2(c) defines a child as a person who has not completed his fifteenth year of age, and an adolescent as a person who has completed his fifteenth year but has not completed his eighteenth. Section 67 states the absolute bar: no child who has not completed his fourteenth year of age shall be required or allowed to work in any factory. Between the fourteenth year and adulthood, employment is permitted only inside a framework of medical certification and restricted hours. Section 68 provides that a child who has completed his fourteenth year or an adolescent shall not be required or allowed to work in any factory unless a certificate of fitness granted with reference to him under Section 69 is in the custody of the manager of the factory and the child or adolescent, while at work, carries a token giving a reference to the certificate. Section 69 governs certificates of fitness: a certifying surgeon, on application by the young person or his parent or guardian accompanied by the manager’s signed undertaking, examines the young person and may grant a certificate, valid for twelve months, certifying fitness to work as a child if he is satisfied the young person has completed his fourteenth year, attains the prescribed physical standards and is fit for the work, or as an adult if the young person has completed his fifteenth year and is certified fit for a full day’s work. Section 71 restricts the working hours of children: a child must not be employed or permitted to work in any factory for more than four and a half hours in any day, or during the night, night meaning a period of at least twelve consecutive hours which includes the interval between ten in the evening and six in the morning; the child’s periods of work must be limited to two shifts which must not overlap or spread over more than five hours each, he must be employed in only one of the relays into which the factory’s children are divided, and his relay may not be changed more than once in thirty days except with the Inspector’s written permission. Sections 72 and 73 require a notice of periods of work for children to be displayed and a register of child workers to be maintained, Section 74 requires the child’s work to correspond with both, and Section 76 empowers an Inspector who has reason to believe a person working in a factory is not of the age claimed to have the age question referred to medical determination, a provision that tells its own story about the practical difficulty of age proof in the workforce the Act governed. Over this scheme sits, from 1986, the separate child labour statute, the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, subsequently the Child and Adolescent Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, which prohibits employment of children below fourteen generally and of adolescents in hazardous occupations and processes; the two statutes run in parallel, and a prosecution or a protection question involving a young worker in a factory often engages both.

Annual leave with wages: Sections 78 to 84

Chapter VIII gives the factory worker something the hours chapter cannot: paid absence. Section 78 applies the chapter to workers including certain persons deriving benefit in respect of whom contributions are paid under the plant arrangements contemplated by the section’s text, and Section 79 states the entitlement. A worker who has worked for a period of two hundred and forty days or more in a factory during a calendar year is allowed, during the subsequent calendar year, leave with wages for a number of days calculated at the rate of one day for every twenty days of work performed by him during the previous calendar year if he is an adult, and one day for every fifteen days of work if he is a child. The explanation to the section counts the day of lay-off, maternity leave for a woman worker up to twelve weeks, and leave earned in the previous year as days of work for the purpose of the two hundred and forty, though they earn no further leave themselves, and a worker whose service commences otherwise than on the first day of January qualifies proportionately once he has worked two-thirds of the remaining days of the year. Leave may be accumulated and carried forward only up to thirty days in the case of an adult and forty days in the case of a child, unless refused leave is carried forward without limit. Leave does not include holidays that fall within or at either end of it, the worker applies in writing ordinarily not less than fifteen days before the leave begins, his choice of timing is regulated so that leave may be refused or split in limited ways under a scheme the section and state rules supply, and a worker who is discharged, dismissed, resigns or dies in service is entitled to leave at the computed rate up to the date of departure or death, with payment for leave standing to his credit if he leaves without having taken it.

Section 80 fixes the wages payable during leave: a worker allowed leave is paid at a rate equal to the daily average of his total full-time earnings for the days on which he actually worked during the month immediately preceding his leave, exclusive of any overtime wages and bonus but inclusive of dearness allowance and the cash equivalent of the advantage accruing through the concessional sale of foodgrains and other articles. Section 81 requires payment in advance where a worker has been allowed leave for not less than four days in the case of an adult and five days in the case of a child, the wages due for the leave period being paid before the leave begins. Section 84 completes the chapter with the exemption power for factories subject to approved leave rules that are not less favourable. Two features of the chapter deserve a reader’s attention. The first is the two hundred and forty day qualifier: like the headcount threshold, it is a rationing device, and it excludes from the entitlement exactly the casual, intermittent worker whose attachment to the factory is weakest, a design carried into the successor code with the qualifying period reduced to one hundred and eighty days. The second is the chapter’s long record as the most-litigated of the Act’s benefit provisions, generating disputes not over the existence of the right but over its arithmetic, on the counting of days, the treatment of lay-off and lockout, the wage components in the daily average, and the leave of workers in seasonal factories, a body of case law large enough that any account of the Act which stopped at the section’s surface would mislead a practitioner about where the work lies.

Contract workers inside the factory gate

The Act’s treatment of contract labour is built into its definitions and is easy to miss because the Act has no chapter on the subject. As set out above, the definition of worker in Section 2(l) covers a person employed directly or by or through any agency, including a contractor, with or without the knowledge of the principal employer, in any manufacturing process or in work incidental or connected with it. Section 119 reinforces the point by giving the Factories Act effect notwithstanding anything contained in the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act 1970. The combined effect is a rule of reach quite different from that of the contract labour statute itself: for the purposes of health, safety, welfare, hours and leave inside the factory, the contractor’s worker is a worker of the factory, counts toward its thresholds, and is owed the Act’s protections by the occupier on whose premises he works, irrespective of which employer pays his wages. The dedicated statute on contract labour, its licensing of contractors and its machinery for prohibiting contract labour in perennial work, is treated in the article on the contract labour Act of 1970, and the point here is the division of labour between the two statutes: the contract labour Act governs the employment relationship and its abolition, while the Factories Act governs the physical conditions of the place where the work is done and refuses to let the interposition of a contractor dissolve the occupier’s responsibility for those conditions. Disputes reach the courts on the boundary, typically where a contractor’s worker has been injured and the occupier and the contractor each contend the other owed the duty, and the consistent thread in the answers is that the Act’s duties are addressed to the occupier and are not displaced by the contracting structure, though the contractor may be liable in parallel.

Enforcement, accidents and penalties: Sections 85 to 106

The enforcement chapters complete the Act’s design, and their most revealing feature is the conviction structure: offences under the Act are committed by named natural persons, the occupier and the manager, and prosecution is gatekept by the inspectorate. Section 88 requires notice of certain accidents: where there occurs in a factory any accident which causes death, or which causes any bodily injury by reason of which the person injured is prevented from working for a period of forty-eight hours or more immediately following the accident, the manager must send notice of it to such authorities and in such form and within such time as may be prescribed. Section 88A requires notice of dangerous occurrences of a prescribed class, whether or not they cause injury. Section 89 requires notice of certain diseases: where any worker in a factory contracts any disease specified in the Third Schedule, the manager must send notice to the prescribed authorities, and a registered medical practitioner who attends on a person he believes to be suffering from such a disease in connection with a factory must report the case, with a fee payable for the report and a penalty for default. Section 90 empowers the state government to direct a formal inquiry into an accident or disease case, Section 91 governs the taking of samples of substances used in a factory, with the occupier entitled to have a portion of the sample for his own analysis, and Section 91A, inserted in 1987, empowers the Chief Inspector or other authorised officer to conduct safety and occupational health surveys in a factory at any time during working hours, with the occupier bound to afford all facilities and the workers bound to be present if required after due notice.

The reporting duties come first in the chapter’s logic. Where an accident in a factory causes death, or bodily injury preventing the injured person from working for forty-eight hours or more immediately following it, the manager must send notice to the prescribed authorities, in the prescribed form and within the prescribed time, under Section 88 of the Act. Dangerous occurrences of the prescribed kinds must likewise be reported under Section 88A whether or not anyone was injured, and the Inspector’s powers then engage: inquiry into the accident, examination of the premises and plant, and the direction that the place be left undisturbed pending examination.

Who can set a prosecution under the Act in motion?

Only the inspectorate. Section 105 forbids any court to take cognizance of an offence under the Act except on a complaint made by, or with the previous sanction in writing of, an Inspector, and Section 106 requires the complaint within three months of the offence coming to the Inspector’s knowledge.

The trial itself must be before a court not inferior to a Metropolitan Magistrate or a Judicial Magistrate of the first class. The gatekeeping is deliberate, and its consequences for how much of the penal architecture in this chapter ever fires are taken up in the procedure discussion below. The reporting duties matter beyond their immediate purpose, because the accident register, the inquiry and the prosecution file are the record from which the Act’s enforcement history, and every serious debate about its effectiveness, is built.

Section 92 is the general penalty, and its history measures the statute’s own changing view of its offences. As enacted in 1948 the penalty was modest. The 1987 amendment substituted the provision in its severe modern form: if in, or in respect of, any factory there is any contravention of the provisions of the Act or of the rules made under it or of any order in writing given under it, the occupier and the manager of the factory are each guilty of an offence punishable with imprisonment for a term which may extend to two years or with fine which may extend to one lakh rupees or with both, and if the contravention continues after conviction, with a further fine which may extend to one thousand rupees for each day of continuation. A proviso fixes minimum fines where a contravention of Chapter IV, or of a rule made under it or an order under Section 87 on dangerous operations, has resulted in an accident causing death or serious bodily injury: the fine shall not be less than twenty-five thousand rupees in the case of an accident causing death, and not less than five thousand rupees in the case of an accident causing serious bodily injury. The substitution moved the maximum fine from two thousand rupees to one lakh and the maximum imprisonment from three months to two years in a single amendment, and a legislature does not multiply a penalty fifty-fold by accident: the 1987 Parliament was signalling that breaches of factory law were to be treated as crimes of substance and not as licensing irregularities. Section 93 allocates liability to the owner of premises in specified cases, typically where the premises are let out in parts to different occupiers and the contravention concerns facilities controlled by the owner, such as water supply, drainage and the common parts. Section 94 enhances the penalty on repeat conviction: a person convicted of an offence and again convicted of an offence involving contravention of the same provision is liable, for the second and every subsequent occasion, to imprisonment for a term which may extend to three years or to a fine which shall not be less than ten thousand rupees but which may extend to two lakh rupees, or to both, subject to the section’s own provisos about the lapse of time between convictions. Section 95 punishes wilful obstruction of an Inspector, failure to produce registers and documents, and concealment or prevention of workers from appearing before the Inspector, with imprisonment that may extend to six months or fine that may extend to ten thousand rupees or both. Section 96A, set out in the hazardous processes discussion, reserves the heaviest penalties, seven years and ten years in the aggravated continuing case, for contraventions of the disclosure, responsibility and warning provisions of Chapter IVA. Sections 97 to 99 deal with offences by workers themselves, penalties for using a false certificate of fitness, and the offence of permitting double employment of a child, and Section 102 empowers the court trying an offence to order the occupier to remedy the matters constituting the offence within a specified period, postponing sentence meanwhile in appropriate cases.

The procedure provisions decide how much of this penal architecture ever fires. Section 105 provides that no court shall take cognizance of any offence under the Act except on complaint made by, or with the previous sanction in writing of, an Inspector, and that no court inferior to that of a Metropolitan Magistrate or a Judicial Magistrate of the first class shall try an offence under the Act. Section 106 fixes a limitation period of three months from the date on which the alleged commission of the offence came to the knowledge of an Inspector, extended where the offence consists of disobeying a written order of an Inspector to six months from the order’s date. The consequences are structural. There is no private prosecution route of consequence under the Act, so whether a contravention becomes a case depends on the Inspector’s knowledge, his sanction and his follow-through within a quarter of a year; an occupier’s realistic exposure depends on the inspectorate’s capacity as much as on the statute’s text. Section 103 adds a presumption of employment where a person is found in a factory at a time when work is going on, placing the practical burden of showing he is not a worker on the occupier, and Section 104 places the onus of proving age on the accused where the act alleged consists of permitting a person young enough to engage the chapter on young persons to work. These provisions, taken together, explain a pattern that every empirical discussion of the Act returns to: sentences imposed in factory prosecutions tend to sit far below the statutory maxima, the conviction pipeline leaks at the sanction and limitation stages, and the deterrent that does the daily work is licensing and inspection discipline rather than the prospect of two years’ imprisonment. The general information in this article is an account of the statute and its record; it is not advice on any individual matter, and anyone facing a prosecution, a compensation claim or a compliance decision under this Act or its successor should take advice on the facts of that matter, because limitation periods and forum rules are unforgiving.

The Act’s paper machinery deserves a mention, because so much of its discipline ran through it. Section 108 requires that in every factory there be displayed, in a conspicuous place and in a language understood by the majority of the workers, a notice containing the prescribed abstracts of the Act and of the rules made under it, together with the name and address of the Inspector and of the certifying surgeon for the factory. Around that notice sat the registers this article has met in their places, of adult workers, of child workers, of leave with wages, of examinations of plant, of accidents and dangerous occurrences, and the periodical returns the occupier had to furnish under the state rules. The point of recording the machinery is that the Inspector’s visit was, in large part, an audit of it: the register of examinations showed the competent person’s cycle, the leave register showed the Section 79 arithmetic, and the notice board showed whether the workers had been told who policed their factory. Enforcement by paper is easy to mock, and the mockery is sometimes earned where registers were kept for the Inspector rather than for the work, but a prescriptive statute has no other memory, and the paper trail is what made the checkable command checkable.

Against the Inspector’s coercive orders the Act provides a departmental appeal. Section 107 gives an occupier aggrieved by a written order of an Inspector thirty days to appeal to the prescribed authority, whose decision is final, and the authority to whom the appeal is preferred may, if it thinks fit, suspend the operation of the order pending the appeal’s disposal. The route matters because the Inspector’s most consequential powers, the Section 40 prohibition order that stops a machine or closes a dangerous building part, and the Section 39 direction for specifications and tests, are exercised by written order in the first instance without a hearing before a court: Section 107 is the occupier’s check on them, short of prosecution and short of the writ jurisdiction of the High Courts. In practice the appeal, the Section 102 remedial order in the magistrate’s court, and the Section 101 defence form a graduated set of correctives around a prosecution system that is prosecutor-gated at entry by Section 105, which is a more considered procedural design than the Act’s critics usually allow.

The judicial treatment in outline

The courts shaped the Act at three points that a pillar article should record, the rest of the litigation being an accumulation of fact-specific prosecutions, leave-arithmetic disputes and quashing proceedings in the High Courts. The first point is the definition’s breadth: the Supreme Court’s reading of “premises” in Bhiwandiwala, holding open salt pans capable of being a factory, established early that the definition is applied to the reality of the process and not to the form of the establishment, and courts consistently read “manufacturing process” in the same spirit, so that the contested ground in definition cases is usually the threshold arithmetic and the worker count rather than the character of the activity. The second point is the occupier doctrine: the passage from the earlier position, under which a company’s nominee with ultimate control could be the occupier, to the post-1987 position settled by J. K. Industries, under which the occupier of a company factory must be one of its directors, has been traced above, and its consequence in practice is that the defence of factory prosecutions is dominated by two questions, whether the accused is the occupier so defined, and whether the Section 101 due diligence route or a factual absence of contravention can be shown. The third point is the strictness with which the penal provisions are applied: because Section 92 makes the occupier and manager guilty of any contravention without proof of personal knowledge as an ingredient of the offence, the courts’ role has been to insist on strict proof of the contravention itself, to apply the limitation in Section 106 rigorously against late complaints, and to use sentencing discretion and Section 102’s remedial orders to calibrate outcomes, a combination that has kept the Act’s criminal law severe in text and measured in application.

Two further features of the case law deserve a paragraph each. The first is volume and forum. The great mass of Factories Act litigation never reached the Supreme Court: it sits in the High Courts as petitions to quash prosecutions, frequently by directors contending that the complaint discloses no offence by them beyond their deemed status, and in the magistrates’ courts as trials of inspection-based complaints, with a steady subsidiary stream of disputes over leave arithmetic under Section 79, over whether particular categories of staff are workers, and over the validity of state rules and exemption notifications. The pattern reveals what the Act’s working law actually was: not a body of appellate doctrine but a litigation practice organised around the complaint, the limitation period and the identity of the accused. The second feature is the fate of constitutional challenge. Challenges to the licensing system, to the threshold definition and to particular welfare mandates, brought on equality and freedom-of-trade grounds, were consistently repelled, the courts treating the regulation of factory conditions as a reasonable restriction in the interest of the general public and the definition’s line-drawing as a legislative choice not open to substitution by a finer judicial line. Parliament’s freedom to move the fence, exercised in 1987 within the Act and in 2020 by replacement, rests on that settled judicial deference.

The amendment arc: 1976, 1987 and the bills that lapsed

The Act was amended on many occasions in minor ways, but two amendments restructured it, and everything after the second was prelude to replacement. The Factories (Amendment) Act 1976, Act 94 of 1976, in force from 26 October 1976, was the first. Its principal moves were definitional and protective: it recast Section 2(m) to carry the twelve-month look-back described above; it substituted the agency-inclusive definition of worker in Section 2(l), settling that persons employed through a contractor count as workers; it added cold storage to the definition of manufacturing process; it made the occupier provision for ships in dry dock; and it strengthened the safety provisions, including the arrangement under which safety officers are required and inquiries follow accidents. The amendment’s theme was reach and machinery: it made the definition harder to escape and the inspection framework more regular, without touching the threshold numbers or the prescriptive method.

The Factories (Amendment) Act 1987, Act 20 of 1987, in force from 1 December 1987, was the second and greater restructuring, and its contents have been detailed in their places above: the general duties in Sections 7A and 7B, the hazardous processes chapter with its disclosure regime, the First and Second Schedules, the safety and occupational health survey power, the recast occupier proviso, and the transformation of the penalties, the general fine ceiling rising from two thousand rupees to one lakh and imprisonment from three months to two years, with the special seven-to-ten-year scale for the disclosure offences. Read as a single legislative act, the 1987 amendment is the high-water mark of the 1948 model: it kept the headcount definition, the prescriptive chapters and the inspectorate, and it overlaid on them a modern language of general duty, information rights and participation, borrowed from the post-disaster reassessment of process safety then under way in industrial countries. That the overlay worked at all is because the chapters were cumulative; that the combined statute became unusually long and dense is the price that was noted even then.

After 1987 the amendment story is one of attempts that failed, and the failure is itself informative. A comprehensive Factories (Amendment) Bill introduced in 2014 proposed to raise the definition thresholds to twenty workers with power and forty without, to liberalise the employment of women in night work, to enlarge overtime ceilings and to recast parts of the compliance machinery; it was examined by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Labour and was not enacted. A narrower Factories (Amendment) Bill 2016 confined itself largely to the overtime ceilings, proposing to raise the Section 64 cap from fifty hours a quarter to one hundred and the Section 65 cap from seventy-five to one hundred and twenty-five, with power for governments to go higher in the public interest; it was passed by the Lok Sabha in August 2016, was not passed by the Rajya Sabha, and lapsed. The pattern across both bills is the pattern of Indian labour amendment generally in that period: state governments, using their Concurrent List power, moved first and faster, Rajasthan’s 2014 amendments to the factory definition and other labour statutes being the most debated, while central amendment repeatedly stalled between the two Houses and between the competing critiques examined below. The Second National Commission on Labour, which had reported in 2002, had meanwhile recommended the consolidation of the labour statutes into a small number of codes, and it was that route, not piecemeal amendment, that finally carried the day.

The succession: the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020

The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020, Act 37 of 2020, which received the President’s assent on 28 September 2020, is one of the four labour codes into which Parliament consolidated twenty-nine central labour laws, and it subsumes thirteen of them, including the Factories Act 1948, the Plantations Labour Act 1951, the Mines Act 1952, the Working Journalists Acts, the Motor Transport Workers Act 1961, the Beedi and Cigar Workers Act 1966, the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act 1970, the Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act 1979 and the Dock Workers legislation. The Code carries forward the Factories Act’s basic subject matter, duties on health, safety and welfare, hazardous processes, working hours, leave, and special provisions for factories, but it re-expresses them as duties of the employer within a single registration and licensing framework administered through Inspector-cum-Facilitators, and it extends beyond factories to establishments generally, with factories as a specially regulated class within it. The Government of India brought all four labour codes into force on 21 November 2025. The Code’s repeal and savings provision repeals the Factories Act 1948 in consequence, and preserves the continuity of what was done under it: registrations, licences, appointments, notifications and rules made under the repealed Act continue in force, so far as they are not inconsistent with the Code, until they are replaced, and the Government’s announcement of the commencement recorded that during the transition the existing laws’ rules, regulations, notifications, standards and schemes continue to remain in force while the corresponding rules under the codes are framed. The practical position for any establishment is therefore dual through the transition: the Factories Act is repealed as a living source of new obligations, and its rules and licences continue to govern day-to-day compliance until the Code’s own instruments displace them, a position the reader should confirm against the state rules applicable to the establishment before acting on it. The comparison of what the codes kept, discarded and changed across the whole of labour law is made in the comparison of the labour codes with the old laws, and the remainder of this section confines itself to what the succession did to the Factories Act’s own design.

Three changes matter most. The first is the fence moved outward. The Code defines a factory as premises whereon twenty or more workers are working, or were working on any day of the preceding twelve months, with the aid of power, or forty or more without the aid of power, retaining the twelve-month look-back and the electronic data processing explanation, and doubling both numbers; a proviso preserves, until a state legislature amends it, any different threshold that state law had fixed before the Code’s commencement. The second is the internal ladder recast, set out in the table above: the canteen attaches at one hundred workers counting contract labour, the crèche at more than fifty workers irrespective of how many are women, the welfare officer at two hundred and fifty, rest rooms at fifty, while the qualifying period for annual leave falls from two hundred and forty days to one hundred and eighty, with leave at one day for every twenty days of work, and the daily hours framework is recast around an eight-hour day within a forty-eight-hour week, with overtime at twice the ordinary rate of wages payable with the worker’s consent. The third is the change of regulatory style: the Code states the employer’s duties in more general terms, leans on rules and standards to carry the detail, gives the Inspector-cum-Facilitator a mandate that includes facilitation, and permits women to be employed in all establishments and at night, between seven in the evening and six in the morning, with their consent and subject to prescribed conditions for safety, holidays and working hours. The Act that this pillar describes should therefore not be stated as in force in the old sense: its text remains the indispensable record of the regime that governed Indian factories for over seventy-five years, the source of the case law and of the transitional rules that continue to operate, and the baseline against which the Code’s promises will be measured, but new obligations are sourced from the Code.

The two critiques and an honest verdict

The compliance critique of the Act, made by industry associations, by the committees that examined the 2014 Bill, and in the ease-of-doing-business literature, runs as follows. The Act is prescriptive where it should be outcome-based: it tells the occupier the whitewash interval and the cubic metres instead of requiring a healthy workplace and letting him choose the means. Its standards date from 1948 and from state rules of uneven vintage, and compliance multiplies licences, registers, returns and inspections across dozens of central and state instruments. Its thresholds cliff-edge at every number, so growth across ten, one hundred and fifty, two hundred and fifty or five hundred workers triggers step changes in cost that reward staying small or fragmenting operations, which is the opposite of what an industrialising economy should want. And its criminal penalties, attached to contraventions that are often technical, expose directors to prosecution out of proportion to personal fault. On this view the successor code’s shift toward general duties, single registration, higher thresholds and facilitation is a modernisation that preserves the ends while retiring an exhausted machinery.

The worker safety critique, made by trade unions, by safety professionals in the DGFASLI tradition, and by the press after successive disasters, answers point for point. The problem was never an excess of specification: the factories that killed their workers were, in the recurring pattern, factories where the specified fence was missing, the specified examination had not been done, the specified notice had never been sent, which is to say factories where the Act was not enforced, and a statute cannot be convicted of failure on the evidence of its own breach. Inspection capacity, not prescription, was the binding constraint, and a regime of general duties and self-certification in an economy where the inspectorate is thin risks converting duty into declaration: the occupier certifies, the facilitator facilitates, and the discipline of the checkable command, the fence that either exists or does not, is lost. The threshold rise, on this view, is not a rationalisation but a removal of the smallest factories, where risk per worker is often highest, from inspection altogether, and the consent framework for women’s night work transfers to the individual worker, with the least bargaining power in the building, a decision that the prohibition previously made collectively on her behalf.

Both critiques identify real features of the record, and a verdict has to be given separately on the design and on the delivery. On the design, the verdict of this article is that the headcount definition was the Act’s original and uncorrected error, not because headcounts are administratively wrong, every statute needs a coverage rule, but because the Act contained no mechanism that adjusted coverage to risk: the First Schedule identified the hazardous processes, Section 85 identified the remedy for the gap, and the two were never joined, so that listing a process as hazardous changed nothing for the sub-threshold unit that carried it on. A design that keyed Chapter IVA to the process wherever carried on, whatever the headcount, was available in 1987 and was not taken. On the delivery, the verdict is that the enforcement critique is the stronger one: the standards were mostly reasonable, the duties mostly clear, and the shortfall lay in inspection numbers, technical depth and prosecutorial follow-through, which are failures of the state that administered the Act and would have weakened any text put in its place. Whether the successor code cures the design error while risking the delivery is the question its own record will answer; the code doubles the threshold, which widens the uncovered zone, but states the hazardous process duties within a framework that applies to establishments generally, and the balance between those two moves is exactly the ground on which its implementation should be judged. For aspirants and teachers working on the Act as an examination subject, the definitional scheme, the occupier doctrine and the threshold ladder are the retrievable core, and keeping a clean provision map of the Act against the Code, of the kind that can be revised from in presentation form on the ReportMedic PPT viewer, is the most efficient way to hold the two regimes apart in an answer.

Closing verdict

The Factories Act 1948 was the statute under which industrial India learned what a regulated workplace was: a licensed premises, a named occupier, a fenced machine, a nine-hour day, a weekly holiday, leave that accrued by arithmetic, and an Inspector who could walk in. Its text concealed its real scope, because everything it promised was promised only inside a fence built of headcounts, and the workers outside the fence, in the small units where much of Indian manufacturing always lived, were promised nothing by it at all. That is the sense in which its series thesis should be remembered: a safety statute whose applicability turns on headcount rather than risk is a statute whose scope is invisible until the threshold analysis is done, and the threshold analysis is therefore not a preliminary to understanding the Act but the understanding itself. The cluster’s specialist articles take up what this pillar has summarised: the framework guide for the threshold architecture across labour law, the comparison of the codes with the old laws for the succession, the contract labour article for the workers inside the gate whom another employer pays, the Bhopal article for the catastrophe that rewrote the Act, and the minimum wages article for the wage floor that accompanied these conditions. The Act is repealed, its rules live on in transition, and its central lesson, that in Indian labour law the definition is the policy, survives it intact.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What makes a premises a factory under the Factories Act?

Section 2(m) defines a factory as any premises, including the precincts, whereon ten or more workers are working, or were working on any day of the preceding twelve months, and in any part of which a manufacturing process is being carried on with the aid of power, or is ordinarily so carried on; or whereon twenty or more workers are working or were so working, and a manufacturing process is carried on without the aid of power. All the workers in different groups and relays in a day are counted together. A mine under the Mines Act 1952, an armed forces mobile unit, a railway running shed and a hotel, restaurant or eating place are excluded. The installation of an electronic data processing or computer unit alone does not make premises a factory if no manufacturing process is carried on there.

Q: What working hours does the Factories Act allow?

Chapter VI fixes four cumulative limits for adult workers. A worker may not be required or allowed to work for more than forty-eight hours in any week under Section 51, or more than nine hours in any day under Section 54. Under Section 55, periods of work must be arranged so that no worker works more than five hours without an interval for rest of at least half an hour. Under Section 56, the periods of work, inclusive of rest intervals, must not spread over more than ten and a half hours in any day, though the Chief Inspector may for recorded reasons increase the spread over to twelve hours. Section 52 adds a weekly holiday, ordinarily the first day of the week, with substitution permitted within three days before or after and a bar on working more than ten days consecutively without a whole day’s holiday. Hours worked beyond nine in a day or forty-eight in a week attract overtime wages under Section 59.

Q: Who is the occupier of a factory and what is their liability?

The occupier is the person who has ultimate control over the affairs of the factory under Section 2(n). Where the factory belongs to a firm, any one of the partners is deemed to be the occupier; where it belongs to a company, any one of the directors is deemed to be the occupier; and where it is owned or controlled by government or a local authority, the person appointed to manage its affairs is deemed to be the occupier. The Supreme Court held in J. K. Industries Ltd. v Chief Inspector of Factories and Boilers in 1996 that, after the 1987 amendment, a company cannot nominate an employee or officer other than a director as occupier. The occupier holds the licence, gives the statutory notices, owes the general duty in Section 7A to ensure the health, safety and welfare of workers, makes the hazardous process disclosures, and is, with the manager, guilty of any contravention under Section 92, punishable with imprisonment up to two years or a fine up to one lakh rupees or both.

Q: What did the Factories Act require after the Bhopal disaster?

Parliament answered the Bhopal disaster of December 1984 inside factory law through the Factories (Amendment) Act 1987. It inserted Chapter IVA, Sections 41A to 41H, on hazardous processes, together with the First Schedule of industries involving hazardous processes and the Second Schedule of permissible exposure limits. The chapter requires Site Appraisal Committees for new hazardous factories, compulsory disclosure by the occupier of dangers and safety measures to workers, the Chief Inspector, the local authority and the general public in the vicinity, an on-site emergency plan, a specific responsibility on the occupier for health records, medical examination and supervision of hazardous substances, permissible exposure limits, Safety Committees with equal worker and management representation, and a right for workers to warn of imminent danger. The same amendment inserted the general duties in Sections 7A and 7B, multiplied the Section 92 penalties, and created the seven-to-ten-year penalty in Section 96A for breach of the disclosure, responsibility and warning provisions.

Q: What welfare facilities must a factory provide?

Chapter V requires washing facilities under Section 42, facilities for storing and drying clothing and for sitting where state rules prescribe them, first-aid boxes at the rate of one for every one hundred and fifty workers under Section 45, with an ambulance room where more than five hundred workers are ordinarily employed, a canteen where more than two hundred and fifty workers are ordinarily employed under Section 46, shelters, rest rooms and a lunch room where more than one hundred and fifty workers are ordinarily employed under Section 47, a crèche where more than thirty women workers are ordinarily employed under Section 48, for children under six of those women, and a welfare officer where five hundred or more workers are ordinarily employed under Section 49. The obligations are therefore laddered by headcount: the full set of facilities is owed only in the largest factories, and a worker’s statutory facilities depend on the size of the establishment that employs her.

Q: How much overtime pay does a factory worker get?

Section 59 entitles a worker who works in a factory for more than nine hours in any day, or for more than forty-eight hours in any week, to wages at the rate of twice his ordinary rate of wages in respect of the overtime work. The ordinary rate of wages means the basic wages plus the allowances, including the cash equivalent of the advantage accruing through the concessional sale of foodgrains and other articles, that the worker is for the time being entitled to; it does not include a bonus or wages for overtime work itself. The exemption provisions cap the overtime that may be authorised: fifty hours in any quarter under exempting rules made under Section 64, and seventy-five hours in any quarter under exempting orders under Section 65, which also bar overtime on more than seven days at a stretch and a week, including overtime, of more than sixty hours.

Q: What annual leave does a factory worker earn?

Section 79 entitles a worker who has worked for two hundred and forty days or more in a factory during a calendar year to leave with wages in the subsequent calendar year at the rate of one day for every twenty days of work performed in the previous calendar year if the worker is an adult, and one day for every fifteen days of work if the worker is a child. Days of lay-off, maternity leave up to twelve weeks for a woman worker, and leave earned in the previous year count toward the two hundred and forty days, though they do not themselves earn leave. Leave may be accumulated up to thirty days for an adult and forty days for a child, holidays falling within the leave are not counted as leave, and wages during leave are paid at the daily average of the worker’s total full-time earnings for the days actually worked in the month immediately preceding the leave, excluding overtime and bonus but including dearness allowance.

Q: Has the Factories Act been repealed?

Yes. The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020, one of the four labour codes, subsumes the Factories Act 1948 along with twelve other central labour laws, and the Government of India brought all four codes into force on 21 November 2025. The Code’s repeal and savings provision repeals the Factories Act, while preserving the continuity of registrations, licences, appointments, notifications and rules made under it: those instruments continue in force, so far as they are not inconsistent with the Code, until they are replaced under the Code, and the commencement announcement recorded that the existing rules, regulations, notifications, standards and schemes continue to operate during the transition while the Code’s own rules are framed. The Factories Act therefore no longer generates new obligations, but its rules continue to govern day-to-day compliance in the transition, and its text remains the source of the case law on the regime that ran from 1949.

Q: What counts as a manufacturing process under the Factories Act?

Section 2(k) defines manufacturing process widely. It covers making, altering, repairing, ornamenting, finishing, packing, oiling, washing, cleaning, breaking up, demolishing, or otherwise treating or adapting any article or substance with a view to its use, sale, transport, delivery or disposal. It also covers pumping oil, water, sewage or any other substance; generating, transforming or transmitting power; composing types for printing by letterpress, lithography, photogravure or other similar processes, and book binding; constructing, reconstructing, repairing, refitting, finishing or breaking up ships or vessels; and preserving or storing any article in cold storage, which was added by the 1976 amendment. Because packing, washing and cleaning are included, premises whose work is preparatory to manufacture elsewhere can fall within the definition, and because the sweep-up phrase “otherwise treating or adapting” is read broadly, the contested questions in practice usually concern the worker threshold rather than the character of the activity.

Q: What is the difference between an occupier and a manager of a factory?

The occupier, under Section 2(n), is the person who has ultimate control over the affairs of the factory, and in the case of a company one of its directors is deemed to be the occupier. The occupier is the statute’s principal duty-bearer: he holds the licence under Section 6, sends the notices under Section 7, owes the general duty of Section 7A, and makes the Chapter IVA disclosures. The manager is the person appointed to manage the factory in its daily operation; the manager gives the notices of accidents and diseases under Sections 88 and 89, keeps the registers of workers, and is responsible for the conduct of the factory within the occupier’s system. The penalty chapter joins them: under Section 92, on any contravention of the Act or the rules, the occupier and the manager of the factory are each guilty of an offence. The distinction confuses many accounts of the Act, because a salaried works manager, however senior, cannot after the 1987 amendment be the occupier of a company factory.

Q: How is a factory registered and licensed under the Factories Act?

Section 6 prohibits the establishment or carrying on of a factory except under a licence granted or renewed by the Chief Inspector or the authority prescribed by state rules. Before a site is used for a factory, or a building is constructed, extended or taken into use as a factory, the occupier must obtain the previous approval in writing of the state government or the Chief Inspector for the site and for the plans and specifications of the factory. Section 7 then requires the occupier to send to the Chief Inspector a written notice, at least fifteen days before he begins to occupy or use any premises as a factory, containing the prescribed particulars: the name and situation of the factory, the occupier’s and owner’s names and addresses, the nature of the manufacturing process, the total rated horsepower installed or to be installed, the manager’s name and the number of workers likely to be employed. Licences are granted for prescribed periods, are renewable, carry fees fixed by state rules, and may be amended or transferred on the prescribed application; carrying on a factory without a licence is itself a contravention punishable under Section 92.

Q: What can a factory Inspector do during an inspection?

Section 9 gives an Inspector, within his assigned local limits, power to enter, with such assistants as he thinks fit, any place which is used, or which he has reason to believe is used, as a factory. Inside, he may make examination of the premises, plant, machinery, articles and substances; inquire into any accident or dangerous occurrence and take statements; require the production of any prescribed register or any other document relating to the factory; seize, or take copies of, any register, record or other document in relation to an offence under the Act which he has reason to believe has been committed; direct that the premises or any part or thing in them be left undisturbed generally or in particular respects for so long as is reasonably necessary for examination following an accident; take measurements and photographs and make recordings necessary for an examination; and take samples of substances under the procedure in Section 91. Sections 39 and 40 give the follow-through: the Inspector may require specifications and tests of parts alleged to be dangerous, and may serve a written order prohibiting the use of a dangerous building, way, machinery or plant until it is remedied.

Q: What must happen after an accident in a factory?

Section 88 requires the manager of the factory to send notice of the accident to the prescribed authorities, in the prescribed form and within the prescribed time, where an accident in the factory causes death, or causes bodily injury by reason of which the injured person is prevented from working for a period of forty-eight hours or more immediately following the accident. Section 88A requires notice of dangerous occurrences of the prescribed kinds, whether or not they result in injury, and Section 89 requires notice where a worker contracts a disease specified in the Third Schedule, with a parallel duty on a registered medical practitioner who attends such a case. The Inspector may then inquire into the accident under Section 9, the state government may direct a formal inquiry under Section 90, and a safety and occupational health survey may be conducted under Section 91A. The accident record also feeds the compensation and prosecution tracks: a contravention of Chapter IV that results in an accident causing death attracts, on conviction under Section 92, a fine of not less than twenty-five thousand rupees.

Q: Can women work night shifts in a factory under the Factories Act?

Under the central text of Section 66, no. A woman may not be required or allowed to work in any factory except between six in the morning and seven in the evening. The state government may vary those limits by notification for a factory or a class of factories, but no variation may authorise the employment of a woman between ten at night and five in the morning. Section 66 also bars any change of a woman’s shift except after a weekly holiday or another holiday, and forbids granting any woman exemption from the daily hours limit in Section 54. The position in practice moved in the Act’s later decades: a number of states amended the restriction within their territories to permit night work by women subject to prescribed safeguards, such as consent, transport and workplace safety conditions. The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 generalised that approach, permitting women to be employed in all establishments and before six in the morning and beyond seven in the evening with their consent and subject to conditions relating to safety, holidays and working hours laid down by the appropriate government.

Q: What is a certificate of fitness, and which young workers need one?

A certificate of fitness is the medical certificate issued by a certifying surgeon under Section 69. Section 68 provides that a child who has completed his fourteenth year, or an adolescent, may not be required or allowed to work in any factory unless the certificate of fitness granted for him is in the manager’s custody and he carries a token at work referring to it. The certifying surgeon, on application by the young person, parent or guardian, with the manager’s signed undertaking to employ him if certified fit, examines the young person and may certify him fit to work as a child, if satisfied that he has completed his fourteenth year, attains the prescribed physical standards and is fit for the work, or fit to work as an adult, if he has completed his fifteenth year and is certified fit for a full day’s work in a factory. A certificate is valid for twelve months, may impose conditions on the work, and may be revoked if the holder is no longer fit. Section 67 stands behind the scheme: a child who has not completed his fourteenth year may not work in a factory at all, certificate or none.

Q: Which machinery must be fenced under the Factories Act?

Section 21 requires secure fencing of the machinery parts from which factory accidents most commonly came. Every part of an electric generator, motor or rotary converter, every part of transmission machinery, and every dangerous part of any other machinery must be securely fenced, as must the head race and tail race of a water wheel and the stock-bar of a machine tool, unless its position or construction makes it as safe as if fenced. Section 26 adds the requirements for new machinery: screws, bolts and keys set into revolving shafts, spindles, wheels and pinions must be sunk, encased or otherwise effectively guarded so as to prevent danger, and all spur, worm and other toothed or friction gearing which does not require frequent adjustment while in motion must be completely encased unless it is so located as to be equally safe. Section 24 requires striking gear for moving driving belts on and off fast and loose pulleys, maintained and securely placed, and Section 25 requires self-acting machines and the material they carry to be kept at a clearance, ordinarily at least forty-five centimetres, from fixed structures.

Q: What is a Site Appraisal Committee under the Factories Act?

A Site Appraisal Committee is the body constituted by the state government under Section 41A to advise on the location of factories involving a hazardous process. The committee consists of the Chief Inspector of the state as chairman, representatives of the state authorities concerned with pollution control and water and air quality, public health engineering, the local authority for the area and the metropolitan or town planning organisation, and other specified members, with the occupier entitled to present his case. Its function is to examine an application for the establishment or expansion of a factory involving a hazardous process and to make recommendations to the state government on the initial location of the factory, having regard to the site appraisal reports and the environmental and safety considerations the section prescribes, and to advise on applications for expansion within the time the section allows. Section 41A was inserted by the Factories (Amendment) Act 1987 as part of Chapter IVA, the post-Bhopal chapter: it moved official scrutiny of hazardous factories forward to the siting stage, before the plant was built, instead of leaving the Inspector to regulate a plant whose location had never been assessed for the risks it stored.

Q: What is the penalty for violating the Factories Act?

Section 92 is the general penalty. On any contravention of the Act, the rules made under it, or a written order under it, the occupier and the manager are each guilty of an offence punishable with imprisonment for a term which may extend to two years, or with fine which may extend to one lakh rupees, or with both. If the contravention continues after conviction, a further fine of up to one thousand rupees applies for each day of continuation. Where the contravention concerns Chapter IV, a rule under it or a Section 87 order, and causes an accident, the fine is at least twenty-five thousand rupees for a death and five thousand for serious bodily injury. Section 94 enhances punishment on a repeat conviction for contravention of the same provision, to imprisonment up to three years or a fine between ten thousand and two lakh rupees. Obstructing an Inspector is punishable under Section 95, and contraventions of the hazardous process duties in Sections 41B, 41C and 41H carry the Act’s heaviest scale under Section 96A, up to seven years’ imprisonment and two lakh rupees, rising to ten years where the contravention continues beyond a year after conviction.

Q: Can the Factories Act be applied to premises below the ten and twenty worker thresholds?

Yes, by executive action rather than automatically. Section 85 empowers the state government, by notification in the Official Gazette, to declare that all or any of the provisions of the Act shall apply to any place in which a manufacturing process is carried on with the aid of power or otherwise, notwithstanding that the number of workers employed there is smaller than the limits in Section 2(m). Where such a notification is issued, the owner of the premises is treated as the occupier or manager for the purposes of the Act, and the premises are treated as a factory. The one exclusion is a place where the manufacturing process is carried on by the occupier only with the aid of his family. Section 85 was Parliament’s own answer to the threshold gap, and its character should be noticed: coverage below the line exists at the discretion of the state government, class by class or place by place, and not as a matter of right. In practice states used the power for particular trades and hazardous small-scale processes, not as a general extension to small manufacturing, which is why the threshold remained the operative boundary of factory regulation.

Q: Can an occupier escape liability by proving another person was at fault?

Section 101 gives the occupier or manager a defined route, not a general escape. Where the occupier or manager is charged with an offence punishable under the Act, he is entitled, upon making a complaint himself and having given the prosecution three clear days’ notice of his intention, to have another person whom he charges as the actual offender brought before the court at the hearing. To succeed, he must prove, first, that he used all due diligence to enforce the execution of the Act, and secondly, that the other person committed the offence in question without his knowledge, consent or connivance. If those two matters are proved and the commission of the offence by the other person is established, the other person is convicted of the offence and the occupier or manager is discharged from liability. If the occupier or manager fails to prove either condition, he remains liable. The provision matters to the debate about the deemed occupier: criminal answerability under the Act is a starting point that the diligent occupier can rebut by identifying the real offender, but mere distance from the factory floor is not, without diligence, a defence.