Opinion Express View on Telangana factory blast: Safety first

The Telangana government has appointed a five-member panel to probe the blast in a factory operated by Sigachi Chemicals in the state’s Sangareddy district. The committee’s first task should be to fix accountability for the explosion that has claimed at least 36 lives. It must ascertain if the unit run by a leading chemical company in the country — its website describes Sigachi Chemicals as “an industry leader” in pharma components, nutraceuticals and food — had sidestepped safety protocols. Preliminary reports indicate that pressure had built up in the unit’s spray dryer that was deployed to produce microcrystalline cellulose (MCC) — a combustible chemical. The machine, which turns liquid or slurry into a powder, requires continuous temperature monitoring to ensure that it does not heat up. The dryer requires regular cleaning and maintenance to obviate the accumulation of fine dust particles — these can turn a spark into a fire. More than 60 workers were at the site when the factory caught fire on Monday. The probe must investigate if Sigachi Chemicals had installed relief vents and fire escapes to protect its employees from harm.

The Telangana explosion is the latest in a series of accidents in the country’s chemical sector. The National Disaster Management Authority’s (NDMA) website estimates that more than 130 chemical accidents have taken at least 259 lives in the past decade. The agency’s website notes that “there are about 1,861 major accident hazard units, spread across 301 districts and 25 states and three Union Territories”. These should be sobering factoids for policymakers in one of the top six chemical manufacturing countries in the world. Although the country has 15 Acts and 19 rules governing different aspects of the chemical industry, none of them deals exclusively with the sector. A national policy on the safety of the chemical industry has been in the works for more than a decade. The NDMA does have a set of guidelines to manage accidents in the sector. However, several studies have pointed out that regulatory deficits, poor monitoring, ageing plants, design flaws, and failure to keep up with the latest technologies make India’s chemical sector vulnerable to accidents. The country has been an outlier on global conversations to enhance the safety of spray dryers, for instance. India also lacks a comprehensive inventory of chemicals used by industry and the risks associated with them.

Advertisement

The panel investigating the Telangana explosion has been mandated “to report on ways to prevent such accidents from reoccurring”. That’s much needed. The Bhopal Gas Tragedy in 1984 led to a rethinking on industrial safety. However, accidents after that horrific tragedy, especially those in recent years — the blast in a Thane chemical factory last year, the Visakhapatnam gas leak of 2020, the blaze at a pharma company in Andhra Pradesh’s Anakapalli district in 2024 — have not pushed the industry and policymakers to plug the knowledge and regulatory deficits. The best tribute to those who have lost lives in such accidents would be to ensure that a rapidly industrialising country does not give short shrift to people’s safety.