Atchutapuram Pharma Factory Explosion, 2024

When workers die in an Indian factory, the inquiry is run by the same Directorate of Factories that licensed and inspected that plant, and its report goes to the government, not to the public. That is exactly what happened here: the Director of Factories submitted a preliminary report within days, but two years on no full inquiry findings have been released, so no outsider can check whether the plant's alarms, pipeline design or emergency plan had been cleared by inspectors before the blast. Andhra Pradesh set up an 11-member expert committee under retired IAS officer Vasudha Mishra in September 2024 with a three-month deadline; former bureaucrat E.A.S. Sarma criticised its members for lacking hands-on safety experience, no worker or trade union representative was included, and union leaders in the SEZ said the panel visited Atchutapuram only once. The same pattern followed the LG Polymers styrene leak in Visakhapatnam in 2020, where district-level safety committees were formed and, as families of victims have pointed out, their reports were never made public either. India has no independent industrial-accident investigator whose job is to publish what went wrong and track whether it was fixed.

The same gap was visible after the LG Polymers styrene gas leak in Visakhapatnam in May 2020, which killed 12 people — a 4,000-page high power committee report went to the Chief Minister but its recommendations were never publicly tracked — and after the June 2023 pharma unit explosion in Anakapalli district that killed six workers.

Rule 13 of the Andhra Pradesh Factories (Amendment) Rules, 2022 says plainly that no inspector shall inspect any factory holding a valid self-certification or third-party certification of compliance, unless the Chief Inspector specifically orders it. Even where inspectors do go, their checks are shallow: a deputy chief inspector told reporters after this blast that 'we usually look at the headcount' and that fire and electrical checks are 'subject to the Ease of Doing Business rules'. The department is also badly understaffed — as of June 2026 it had no regular director, and 12 inspector of factories posts and one to two deputy chief inspector posts were still vacant, in a state with roughly 26,400 registered factories. This is the same inspection regime that failed to catch the storage and cooling defects at LG Polymers in Visakhapatnam before the 2020 styrene leak. The global union federation IndustriALL, which counted more than 400 worker deaths across Indian workplaces in 2024, says India's new occupational safety law has 'severely weakened the inspectorate system' by ending surprise inspections and allowing self-certification.

The same gap was visible in the May 2020 LG Polymers styrene leak in Visakhapatnam, where a plant with known design and refrigeration defects had been operating for years without inspectors catching them, and in the run of accidents across the Visakhapatnam industrial belt — the Chief Minister himself cited 119 industrial accidents and 120 deaths in the district since 2019.

India has no rule forcing a hazardous chemical plant to obtain a periodic independent safety audit before it keeps operating, and the audits that do happen are paid for by the company being audited. In Anakapalli district — which has 143 hazardous units — only 41 red-category units were covered by a third-party audit requirement at the time of this blast, out of roughly 300 such units. Andhra Pradesh's own Labour and Factories Minister, Vasamsetti Subhash, said frequent mishaps in the industry are often due to inadequate supervision by third-party agencies, and safety professionals quoted in June 2026 said the arrangement makes the audit a farce: 'No industrial unit would accept a critical safety audit by paying a fee to those who come for the audit.' Workers and unions at Atchutapuram said no safety audit had been done at the plant for several years before the explosion.

The same gap was visible in the May 2020 LG Polymers styrene leak in Visakhapatnam, where the state's own inquiry found a poorly designed tank, a faulty cooling system and an inadequate process safety management system that no audit had forced the company to fix, and in the June 2023 Anakapalli pharma explosion that killed six workers.

An SEZ is built to make land and clearances easy, and safety accountability falls between the agencies involved. After this blast, APIIC's zonal manager said the corporation allots land to companies that create jobs but that what happens inside the plant falls outside its jurisdiction; the Labour department's deputy commissioner said their task is only to make sure staff receive aid on time when there is an accident or a death; and the deputy chief inspector of factories described checks limited to headcount, fire and electricity, subject to ease-of-doing-business rules. That leaves no agency that owns the question of whether a hazardous plant is safe to run tomorrow. Workers in the zone say accident investigation reports are never shared with them, and a Parma City workers' union leader said committee members were simply inaccessible. The Atchutapuram and Parawada SEZ belt had already seen a reactor explosion a month before this blast, and had another fatal fire at a Parawada plant in June 2026 that killed two workers.

The same gap was visible at Jawaharlal Nehru Pharma City in Parawada, where four workers were injured in a chemical accident two days after the Atchutapuram blast and two more were killed in a June 2026 fire, and in the wider Visakhapatnam industrial belt that has recorded accidents at HPCL, Hetero Drugs, Porus Laboratories and LG Polymers over the past decade.