Factories Act, 1948

Overview of the Factories Act, 1948

The Factories Act, 1948 was enacted to unify fragmented factory regulations across British India into one law governing health, safety, and welfare in industrial workplaces. It’s the reason HR teams track things like ventilation, machine guarding, and worker registers in the first place. As of November 21, 2025, its provisions live in the OSH Code, 2020, which kept the same core concepts under new numbers.

Key Definitions

• Factory: premises employing 20 or more workers with the aid of power, or 40 or more without power, on any day in the preceding 12 months, carrying out a manufacturing process (making, altering, repairing, packing, or breaking up goods, or generating power).
• Worker: anyone doing manual, skilled, technical, operational, or clerical work, excluding supervisory staff earning above ₹18,000 a month.
• Occupier: the person with ultimate control over the factory’s affairs, usually the owner, partner, or a designated director, unchanged in substance from the old Act.

Exemptions still apply to mobile Armed Forces units, railway running sheds, hotels and shops (covered under Shops & Establishments law), mining operations, and construction sites without manufacturing, each regulated under its own law instead.

Key Provisions: Health, Safety, and Welfare

Health Provisions

• Cleanliness routines, whitewashing, and proper waste disposal.
• Ventilation, temperature control, and lighting norms.
• Safe drinking water and limits on overcrowding.

These sit under the employer’s general duty of care (Section 6 of the OSH Code), including a free annual health examination for workers, a change from the old Act’s narrower medical-exam rules. Audit air quality, lighting, and cleanliness on a set schedule rather than reactively, since these are the lapses inspectors flag most often.

Safety Provisions

• Machine guarding, emergency stops, and routine safety audits.
• PPE distribution, training, and replacement.
• Annual testing of lifting gear, pressure vessels, and fire safety equipment.
• Extra protocols for hazardous processes: risk assessments, emergency SOPs, mock drills, and health surveillance.

Did You Know? Many factory fires trace back to poorly maintained wiring and blocked exits, not missing extinguishers.

Welfare Provisions

Thresholds changed here, under Sections 23–24 of the OSH Code: canteens now kick in at 100+ workers (down from 250+), crèches at 50+ workers and no longer tied specifically to women workers (the old Act’s test was 30+ women), and welfare officers at 250 to 500 workers, with an extra officer per additional 500. Gender-specific washrooms, sanitation, and first aid provisions carry over in substance.

Working Hours and Employment

• Hours: 8 hours a day (down from 9), 48 hours a week, 12-hour maximum spreadover.
• Overtime: double wages, same as before, but now requires the worker’s consent, which the old Act didn’t specify.
• Women’s night work: this one flipped. The old default was no shifts between 7 PM and 6 AM, with states granting exceptions. The OSH Code’s default is the opposite, night work is nationally permitted, but only with written consent, safe transport, a female supervisor on shift, and a grievance mechanism in place. States are layering their own extra safeguards on top, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Delhi each have their own notifications, so check the local position before rewriting shift-policy language.
• Adolescents: no hazardous work, restricted hours, fitness certificate required, unchanged in substance.
• Leave: 1 day per 20 days worked, accumulable up to 30 days, unchanged.

Compliance Requirements and Registration

The biggest change here isn’t a rule, it’s the paperwork itself. The OSH Code replaces 6 separate registrations most factories needed with one registration per establishment, filed as Form I on the Shram Suvidha Portal, with a registration certificate (Form III) issued within 7 days or deemed granted if it isn’t. Existing factories had 6 months to update their details after the Code took effect, and any change now needs reporting within 30 days.
Central rules still set the baseline, the OSH Code itself, the OSH (Central) Rules, and IS/BIS technical standards for equipment like ventilation, PPE, and machinery, while day-to-day enforcement stays state-led, covered in the Recent Amendments section below. That two-layer structure, central baseline plus state-specific rules that can be stricter, carries over unchanged from how the old Act worked with its own state Factories Rules.
Compliance registers, worker records, leave registers, and health registers for hazardous-process workers continue in substance, though the paperwork itself has been trimmed as part of the same consolidation described in the next section. HR teams that already maintain a state-specific compliance tracker don’t need to rebuild it from scratch, just update it against whichever framework, old state Rules or new OSH Rules, actually applies where they operate.

Forms, Returns, and Inspections

The consolidation is significant: 55 old forms across the repealed laws come down to around 20, and 21 separate returns become 1. Registration now runs on Form I (application) and Form III (certificate). The old Act’s individually numbered forms, Form 1, Form 2, Form 10, Form 20, Form 34, and so on, don’t carry over one-to-one under a confirmed new scheme; treat those old numbers as historical rather than current. One confirmed addition: the annual return now also requires a declaration of ESI and PF contributions.

Inspection Preparedness

• Keep your Form I/III registration proof, current worker and leave registers, and safety-equipment test records in one place, not scattered across departments.
• Hazardous-process units should have risk assessments, SOPs, and training logs ready to show on request, not just on file somewhere.
• A missing or expired registration is one of the fastest ways to turn a routine visit into an escalated one.

Penalties for Non-Compliance

These figures come from the OSH Code’s own enforcement framework, not the earlier Act, and in most cases they run considerably higher. Liability still falls on the occupier first, with the factory manager and, for major lapses, individual directors also on the hook:

Section 115 also lets a court direct part of any penalty toward a social security fund for unorganised workers, or to the victim or their heirs as compensation where a violation caused death or serious injury, a mechanism the old Act didn’t have.

Recent Amendments and State Variations

The OSH Code itself is the amendment that matters most, and it’s covered above. What’s changing right now is how unevenly states are rolling out their own OSH Rules underneath it, and until a state notifies its own rules, its older state-level Factories Rules continue to apply as a stopgap, which is exactly why the table below matters for day-to-day compliance, not just as background reading: