There are about 8.5 million workers employed in the construction sector in India. Construction workers constitute a major portion of the unorganized labour and are characterized by their casual nature of employment, temporary relationship with the employer, prolonged and uncertain working hours, lack of safety and health measures, and inadequacy of basic amenities and welfare facilities. There are many legislation clauses providing safeguards for contract workers in India. Construction safety has been made legally enforceable after the enactment of The Building and Other Construction Workers (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act in 1996 and the Central Rules in 1998. This paper details various statutory provisions for construction safety in India with specific reference to the BOCW Act, Central Rules, and State Rules.

The construction industry in India is the country’s second largest industrial sector, after agriculture. The construction industry makes a remarkable contribution to the Indian economy and provides employment to a large number of people of Idia. Fire is a chemical reaction of a combustible substance with oxygen, involving heat and is usually accompanied by a visual flame or incandescence. Ensuring fire safety has always been a challenge to the stakeholders, i.e. building owners, construction companies, contractors and sub-contractors, and government employees due to the multiplicity of the factors involved and their complexity. There are various legal standards and requirements for ensuring fire safety on construction sites. The buildings are normally provided with firewalls during construction and these firewalls separate two structures or divide a structure into smaller portions to prevent the spread of fire. The lightweight construction and trusses are designed to support only their own weight. During a fire, if one fails, a domino effect happens and all fail rapidly within 5 to 10 minutes. Prolonged exposure to fire may result in structural collapse and injury or death of the occupants of the building under construction. Fire safety on construction sites is still in its primitive stages in India. There is a great necessity to improve fire safety on construction sites to protect construction workers and other occupants of the buildings. This study aims to design and implement fire safety systems for construction sites, thereby enhancing the standards to meet the system requirements at par with global standards.

In recent years, a lot of attention has been paid to deep learning methods in the context of vision-based construction site safety systems. However, there is still more to be done to establish the relationship between supervised construction workers and their essential personal protective equipment, like hard hats. A deep learning method combining object detection, head center localization, and simple rule-based reasoning is proposed in this article. In tests, this solution surpassed the previous methods based on the relative bounding box position of different instances and direct detection of hard hat wearers and non-wearers. Achieving MS COCO style overall AP of 67.5% compared to 66.4% and 66.3% achieved by the approaches mentioned above, with class-specific AP for hard hat non-wearers of 64.1% compared to 63.0% and 60.3%. The results show that using deep learning methods with a humanly interpretable rule-based algorithm is better suited for detecting hard hat non-wearers.