Introduction
India’s e-commerce sector has grown with extraordinary velocity, generating enormous logistical infrastructure. The warehouses, fulfilment centres, and last-mile delivery networks that support companies like Amazon India, Flipkart, Meesho, and Blinkit collectively employ millions of workers, many of them in conditions that expose them to significant occupational health and safety risks. The warehouse worker who lifts and moves packages under productivity quotas, the delivery executive who navigates urban traffic on a two-wheeler in monsoon rain, and the cold storage logistics worker who spends hours in sub-zero environments are all participants in India’s e-commerce economy. They are also workers whose occupational safety protections are, in practice, inadequate.
The legal architecture for occupational safety in the logistics and warehouse sector is complex, fragmented, and in a state of transition as the four labour codes are progressively notified. The Factories Act 1948 covers manufacturing establishments but applies to warehouses only in limited circumstances. The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 (OSH Code), which is intended to consolidate and expand occupational safety regulation, has not been fully notified in most states. The Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act 1970 governs the extensive use of contract workers in e-commerce fulfilment operations, but its safety provisions are secondary to its focus on regularisation of contract labour.
Meanwhile, the gig delivery executive operates in a particularly acute zone of legal exclusion. The injury risk faced by delivery riders is among the highest in any occupation; road accidents, dog attacks, and physical assault are documented hazards of the job. Yet the legal protections applicable to these workers are minimal, because their classification as independent contractors rather than employees means that the primary occupational safety statute (the OSH Code) and the primary compensation statute (the Employee Compensation Act 1923) do not apply to them in their formal terms.
Legal Framework
The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 consolidates thirteen existing statutes, including the Factories Act 1948, the Contract Labour Act 1970, the Building and Other Construction Workers (RECS) Act 1996, the Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act 1979, and others. The Code extends the statutory definition of “establishment” to include warehouses and distribution centres that employ at least ten workers, bringing a significant portion of the e-commerce logistics sector within the Code’s ambit for the first time.
However, the OSH Code’s application in practice remains contingent on state-level rule notification. As of 2025, the Code’s provisions have not been fully notified in most major industrial states including Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, and Telangana. Where the Code has not been notified, the Factories Act 1948 continues to apply to establishments that meet the Factories Act’s definition (which is primarily focused on manufacturing establishments with power-operated machinery rather than warehouses), leaving large warehouse operations in a regulatory gap.
The Employee Compensation Act 1923 (ECA) provides the primary compensation mechanism for workers injured in the course of employment. The ECA applies to “workmen” as defined in the Act, which includes workers employed in the transport, construction, factory, and certain other specified industries. Delivery workers employed directly by logistics companies are generally covered by the ECA. However, gig delivery executives classified as contractors are not employees and therefore cannot claim compensation under the ECA; they depend on voluntary accident insurance provided by their platforms, which is typically limited in coverage and scope.
The Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act 1970 (CLRA) is central to the legal organisation of work in e-commerce fulfilment centres. Amazon India, Flipkart, and similar companies extensively use contract labour through third-party agencies for warehouse operations, including picking, packing, sorting, and dispatch. Under the CLRA, the principal employer (Amazon India or Flipkart) is responsible for ensuring that the contractor provides specified welfare amenities, including canteens, rest rooms, first aid facilities, and drinking water. However, the enforcement of these obligations in practice is often poor, and the liability framework is complex: the principal employer bears residual liability only if the contractor fails to meet its obligations, and the primary enforcement mechanism is inspection by a government officer rather than civil litigation by the worker.
The Employee State Insurance Act 1948 (ESIC) provides health insurance and accident benefit coverage for employees of covered establishments, funded by employer and employee contributions. ESIC covers establishments employing ten or more persons and engaged in specified industries, including factories, shops, hotels, restaurants, and motor transport establishments. E-commerce warehouses and logistics centres fall within the coverage of ESIC, and direct employees of these establishments are entitled to ESIC’s medical benefits and accident compensation. Gig delivery workers and contract workers engaged through certain categories of labour contractors may fall outside ESIC’s net, creating coverage gaps precisely for the workers with the highest injury risk.
Judicial Developments
The Amazon India warehouse worker controversy of 2021-2022, which attracted significant media and parliamentary attention, highlighted the gap between the statutory framework’s formal requirements and the on-the-ground reality of working conditions in large e-commerce fulfilment centres. Workers and labour organisations raised concerns about excessive productivity quotas, inadequate rest breaks, unsafe working postures, and the use of surveillance technology to monitor and discipline workers. Parliamentary committee members raised these concerns in committee meetings, and the Ministry of Labour and Employment was asked to respond.
While no definitive Supreme Court authority specifically addresses e-commerce warehouse conditions, the Court’s jurisprudence on workplace safety in industrial establishments provides the relevant framework. In Consumer Education and Research Centre v. Union of India (1995), the Court held that the right to health at the workplace is a dimension of the right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution, and that employers have a constitutional, not merely statutory, obligation to ensure safe working conditions. This foundational holding provides the constitutional grounding for judicial intervention in cases where statutory protections are inadequate or unenforced.
Several Labour Courts and High Courts have in recent years entertained writ petitions filed by contract workers in logistics establishments challenging their exclusion from ESIC coverage and seeking directions that their employing establishments be brought within the ESI Act’s ambit. The Courts have generally applied the functional test of employment, looking at factors like the degree of control exercised by the principal employer and the nature of the work performed, to determine whether the contract labour arrangement should attract ESIC liability on the principal employer.
Contemporary Issues and Analysis
The occupational hazards specific to the e-commerce logistics sector deserve systematic legal analysis. In fulfilment centres, workers face repetitive strain injuries from sustained lifting, packing, and sorting operations under productivity targets. Musculoskeletal disorders arising from sustained awkward posture and repetitive motions are well-documented occupational diseases in warehouse settings. The OSH Code includes provisions on the prevention of occupational diseases, but without detailed notified rules specifying ergonomic requirements for warehouse operations, these provisions remain aspirational.
Heat stress is a significant hazard in India’s non-air-conditioned warehouses and outdoor delivery operations during summer months, when temperatures in many parts of India exceed forty degrees Celsius. The extreme heat events of 2022, 2023, and 2024 resulted in documented cases of heat exhaustion among outdoor delivery workers. No specific regulation in India sets maximum temperature thresholds for outdoor work or mandates rest breaks, hydration provisions, and shade for workers in extreme heat, a gap that stands in stark contrast to the detailed heat stress prevention standards that exist in some Gulf Cooperation Council countries.
Road accident risk for delivery executives is among the most acute occupational safety issues in the e-commerce sector. Data from the National Crime Records Bureau and the Ministry of Road Transport consistently show that two-wheeler riders are among the most vulnerable road users in India, accounting for a disproportionate share of road fatalities. Delivery executives, who spend extended periods riding under time pressure and navigating unfamiliar routes in traffic, face elevated accident risk relative to the general two-wheeler riding population. The absence of workmen’s compensation coverage for gig-classified delivery workers means that the economic consequences of these accidents fall entirely on the worker and their family.
Comparative and International Perspective
The EU Platform Work Directive 2024, discussed in the context of gig worker classification, also has direct implications for occupational safety. By establishing a rebuttable presumption of employment for platform workers, the Directive ensures that platform-classified workers who meet the employment criteria are brought within the scope of the EU’s health and safety framework. The EU Framework Directive on Safety and Health at Work (89/391/EEC) and its daughter directives apply to employees, meaning that the employment classification determination directly affects the platform worker’s access to occupational safety protections.
The UK’s Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, unlike many safety statutes, imposes duties on employers in respect of persons other than their direct employees, including contractors and self-employed persons working on the employer’s premises or on the employer’s work. The Pimlico Plumbers litigation, in establishing that operatives classified as self-employed were in fact “workers” for the purposes of UK employment law, had the practical effect of bringing them within the scope of health and safety obligations. This expansive approach to the coverage of safety obligations provides a model for India to consider.
The ILO’s Decent Work Agenda and the ILO’s Occupational Safety and Health Convention (No. 155), which India has ratified, establish obligations to progressively develop a national occupational safety and health policy and to review that policy regularly. The ILO’s more recent work on occupational safety for platform workers reflects the international recognition that the gig economy creates safety gaps that require regulatory attention.
Practical and Policy Implications
The practical implications of the current legal framework’s inadequacies are borne by the most economically vulnerable participants in the logistics chain. Contract workers in warehouses who are injured on the job may find that the liability question between the contractor (their nominal employer) and the principal employer (the e-commerce company) is litigated over months or years while they lack income. Gig delivery workers who are injured in road accidents face the prospect of medical costs and income loss with no institutional support.
The business case for occupational safety investment in the logistics sector is, in principle, clear: worker injuries result in lost productivity, recruitment and training costs, and reputational risk. The difficulty is that the fragmented labour supply chain in logistics (principal employer, labour contractor, gig platform) disperses both the costs of safety failures and the liability for them in ways that reduce the incentive for any single actor to invest in safety.
Principal employer liability under the CLRA framework provides a partial response: if the principal employer bears residual liability for the welfare of contract workers, it has an incentive to enforce safety standards on its contractors. But this incentive is weakened by the practical difficulty of monitoring compliance across a large and dispersed contractor network.
Suggestions and Reforms
The OSH Code should be notified urgently in all states, with specific attention to the inclusion of e-commerce warehouses and logistics establishments within the regulated category. State governments should be supported in this exercise through central technical assistance.
The Code should be supplemented by sector-specific regulations for the logistics and warehouse sector, including ergonomic standards for manual handling operations, maximum continuous work duration before mandatory rest breaks, temperature thresholds triggering heat stress prevention protocols, and mandatory incident reporting for occupational injuries and near-misses.
Gig delivery workers should be brought within the statutory accident insurance scheme, either through an extension of ESIC to cover platform-classified workers (with aggregators paying the employer’s contribution) or through a mandatory accident insurance requirement imposed on aggregators as a condition of their operating licence.
The MGNREGA social audit model of community-based monitoring should be adapted for occupational safety in the logistics sector, creating a mechanism for workers to report safety violations anonymously and for those reports to trigger inspections.
Conclusion
The extraordinary growth of India’s e-commerce sector has created logistical infrastructure that employs millions of workers in conditions that pose real occupational safety risks. The legal framework, in its current state of partial notification and incomplete coverage, provides inadequate protection for the workers most exposed to those risks. The OSH Code represents the right legislative response to the fragmented safety regulatory landscape but has not been made operational. Sector-specific regulation for the logistics and e-commerce industry is needed urgently, along with the extension of accident insurance to gig delivery workers who bear the highest personal risk in the supply chain. The right to a safe workplace, affirmed by the Supreme Court as a constitutional dimension of the right to life, must translate from doctrinal principle to operational reality for the warehouse worker and the delivery executive.
