AHMEDABAD: Gujarat continues to carry the country’s heaviest factory-fatality burden, with 2,282 workers reportedly killed in registered factory accidents over 2015–2024, the highest among States in every year of the decade.
The sharper paradox lies elsewhere: while non-fatal injuries have fallen 62 per cent and convictions in factory-safety cases have surged, the number of fatal accidents remains stubbornly high.
The data raise a larger governance question for Gujarat’s industrial model. Is enforcement becoming stronger, but prevention still failing to keep pace?
Gujarat’s industrial success story comes with a grim safety statistic
The State has reported the highest number of fatal injuries in registered factories among all States every year from 2015 to 2024.
According to data placed before the Lok Sabha by the Union Ministry of Labour and Employment, Gujarat reported 2,282 fatal factory injuries and 8,533 non-fatal injuries between 2015 and 2024.
The State’s fatal factory injuries accounted for 20.7 per cent of the national total, while its non-fatal injuries constituted 15.9 per cent of all reported non-fatal factory injuries during the decade.
Gujarat recorded 206 fatal injuries in 2015, with the toll surging to a decade-high 272 in 2016. Fatalities remained above the 200-mark in most subsequent years before declining to 188 in 2024, underscoring the persistent burden of deadly industrial accidents in the State.
Most strikingly, Gujarat had the highest reported number of fatal factory injuries among States in every year from 2015 to 2024.
In 2024, Gujarat reported 188 fatalities, ahead of Maharashtra's 157 and Tamil Nadu's 153.
The trend is significant because Gujarat’s fatality numbers have not followed the same steep decline seen in non-fatal injuries. Non-fatal injuries dropped from 1,516 in 2015 to 574 in 2024, a fall of more than 62 per cent. Fatal injuries, however, declined by only about 9 per cent, from 206 to 188 over the same period.
In other words, the frequency of reported injuries has fallen sharply, but the fatality burden remains stubbornly elevated.
That contrast places Gujarat’s industrial safety administration under a sharper lens. The government has continued to prosecute factories and establishments for violations, but the persistence of deaths suggests that enforcement after an accident may not necessarily translate into effective prevention before one occurs.
The latest enforcement numbers underline the scale of the challenge.
In 2024, Gujarat had 13,250 prosecutions pending from previous years, while 3,993 fresh prosecutions were launched and 3,231 cases were decided. Of the cases decided, 2,988 resulted in convictions, while the total fine imposed stood at Rs 2.63 crore.
The conviction numbers are particularly striking
Gujarat recorded 1,497 convictions in 2022, 2,381 in 2023 and 2,988 in 2024. At the same time, the number of cases pending from previous years declined from 14,619 in 2022 to 13,250 in 2024.
This creates the central Gujarat paradox: legal action is intensifying even as fatal factory accidents remain high.
The Union government identifies the principal causes of industrial accidents as falls from height, fire, explosions, mechanically powered machinery, electrocution and workers being struck by falling objects.
These risks are particularly consequential for a State with a large and diverse industrial base, although the supplied data do not break Gujarat’s fatalities down by individual industry or accident cause.
The figures therefore do not support a simplistic claim that Gujarat’s industries are becoming either safer or more dangerous overall.
Instead, they reveal a two-speed safety picture: reported non-fatal injuries have fallen substantially, while deaths have remained persistently high.
The figures cover registered factories, and the Labour Ministry says the Directorate General of Occupational Safety and Health collects accidental death and injury data from states and Union Territories for factories registered under the Factories Act, 1948, now subsumed under the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020.
Therefore, the figures should not be treated as a complete count of every industrial accident occurring across Gujarat. The regulatory landscape itself has also changed.
The OSH & WC Code, 2020 came into force on November 21, 2025, while the Central Rules were notified on May 8, 2026.
The accident series in this dataset, however, runs only up to 2024 and therefore largely predates the new regime.
For Gujarat, that makes the coming years critical. The State’s industrial-growth narrative increasingly has to be measured not only through investment, production and employment, but also through whether workers return home safely. The political and governance question is consequently shifting from “How many cases were prosecuted?” to “Why are workers still dying?”