Improving Mental Health In An Industrial Workplace In India
- IJLLR Journal
- Apr 5
- 2 min read
Bhavana K, B.A.LL.B. (Hons.), School of Law, Dhanalakshmi Srinivasan University
ABSTRACT
The psychological welfare of workers engaged in India’s industrial establishments has, for the better part of the post-independence era, occupied a position of structural neglect within the national legal order. Concern for the worker’s body — his physical safety amid dangerous machinery, his exposure to toxic substances, his entitlement to wages — has historically consumed the legislative and judicial imagination, while the injuries sustained by his mind have gone largely unacknowledged and unredressed. This research paper contends that such neglect is not merely a policy failure; it constitutes a deficit in constitutional fidelity.
The paper undertakes a systematic and critical examination of the legal frameworks governing mental health in Indian industrial workplaces which analyses the constitutional guarantees from which a right to psychological well-being may be derived, scrutinises the principal statutes — the Factories Act, 1948; the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017; and the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020 — for their adequacy in protecting workers from psychosocial harm, and examines the developing judicial jurisprudence on employer liability for mental injury. The paper draws selectively upon comparative experience from the United Kingdom and Australia, and situates India’s domestic framework within the architecture of its obligations under the International Labour Organization’s conventions and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Existing legislation addresses mental health only incidentally, through provisions primarily designed to manage physical hazards and regulate working hours. There is no statute that imposes affirmative obligations on industrial employers to assess psychosocial risks, provide mental health support, or create psychologically safe working environments. The paper concludes with a programme of reform that is both normatively grounded and legislatively feasible, including the amendment of the OSH Code, the enactment of standalone anti-harassment legislation, the mandatory provision of employee assistance programmes, and the reform of the Employees’ State Insurance scheme to bring occupational mental health injuries within its compensatory ambit.
