Cost-Benefit Analysis of Safety Policies on Construction Sites in India

This thesis explores Indian construction industry safety measures and their benefit to cost ratios. In India, the construction sector is the second largest employer after agriculture. Around 50 million workers work in the construction sector to earn easy money at the end of the day. About 48,000 workers die in India due to occupational accidents every year, and around 38 construction accidents occur every day in India. This thesis analyses the social impacts of safety policies and their employers' financial implications. No such studies have been done previously for the Indian construction market. There have been studies regarding estimating the number of accidents in India, respective safety measures, etc. Implementation of safety policies can reduce the number of casualties up to 20%-30%. The performance of safety policies will benefit the workers, their families, friends, relatives, and society. It is common for Indian construction companies not to invest in construction health & safety measures because it is cheaper for them to pay the costs of compensation for accidents than modernizing their facilities to make them safer. It seems essential to understand the need to invest in safety measures from a societal perspective. Thus, this research is a study about the impacts of safety policies with cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and how the CBA results can be utilized in the decision making for the policymakers, employers, and other stakeholders in the industry. First, a literature review was conducted to better understand the Indian construction industry's problems and probable solutions. Literature was also undertaken to understand the concepts regarding the cost-benefit analysis. Additionally, interviews were conducted to get the required data to perform the cost-benefit analysis and partly answer the research questions. For the research, eight interviews were conducted with people who closely work in the Indian construction industry. Based on the interviews, fiv
Management of Technology (MoT)