The sequence probably looked unremarkable in the production schedule — an electrical setup on an active shoot, a crew member doing what crew members do every day on Indian film sets. Then he was dead. The worker who suffered a fatal electric shock on the sets of Love & War, the Sanjay Leela Bhansali romantic drama, left behind something more than grief: he left behind a question that India's entertainment industry has been deferring for years. The country still has no dedicated Film Set Safety Act.
That absence is not an oversight. It is a choice — one made easier by the fact that the workers most exposed to set hazards are the least visible in any industry conversation: the daily-wage electricians, construction crew building temporary sets, stunt doubles, spot boys, and junior artists who cycle through productions without contracts, without documented safety briefings, and without the standing to demand either.
A Patchwork That Was Never Designed for This
Film shoots in India are governed, in the loosest possible sense, by a mosaic of general criminal law, labour legislation, fire safety rules, municipal regulations, and conditions attached to shooting permits. When something goes wrong, liability is rarely confined to a single person. According to Aishwarya Kaushiq, partner at BTG Advaya, producers and project owners typically respond to on-set deaths by arguing that safety was delegated to qualified third-party agencies and that all necessary precautions were observed — framing the fatality as a tragic accident rather than the consequence of negligence.
That framing works precisely because the law allows it to. No sector-specific statute defines what a certified film safety professional must know, what a pre-shoot risk assessment must contain, or what documentary trail a production must maintain before executing a high-risk scene. The absence of mandatory standards is what makes the delegation-to-a-third-party defence so durable.
Sonam Chandwani, managing partner at KS Legal & Associates, identifies the most common hazard categories on Indian sets: action sequences, temporary set construction, electrical installations, pyrotechnics, crowd management, and the accumulated fatigue of brutal working hours. Many of these accidents are not random misfortune. They follow predictably from the absence of qualified safety supervisors and the failure to enforce standard operating procedures.
The Codes That Haven't Arrived
India does have labour law architecture that could, in principle, reach film workers. The Factories Act 1948, the Building and Other Construction Workers Act 1996, and the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 all carry provisions relevant to hazardous worksites. The problem is fit. None of these instruments was designed for a production environment that moves locations every few days, assembles a mixed workforce of permanent staff and daily contractors for each shoot, and routinely deploys specialised high-risk activities — controlled explosions, wire-work, live electrical rigs — that no factory inspector was ever trained to evaluate.
The Occupational Safety Code 2020 is the most promising framework for reform, but it remains incompletely implemented at the state level. Labour law scholar Ramapriya Gopalakrishnan has argued that the Code must be complemented by sector-specific rules under Section 67 that address film and entertainment directly. That work has not happened. The Ministry of Labour and Employment has issued no sector-specific guidelines for film sets. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has not legislated mandatory safety audits or pre-shoot risk-assessment protocols. Think tank Daksh has flagged the broader pattern of India's Labour Codes stalling at the state implementation stage — which means that even if central rules were notified tomorrow, the protection would take years to reach workers on sets in Maharashtra, Telangana, and Tamil Nadu.
The Producers Guild of India acknowledged in a 2023 statement that voluntary safety codes adopted by major studios are inconsistently implemented and carry no legal enforcement mechanism. Voluntary, in this context, means optional under pressure — and pressure dissipates quickly between incidents.
What a Law Would Actually Require
Experts argue that the industry must move from reactive compensation to preventive compliance. The architecture they propose is straightforward: mandatory written risk assessments before hazardous scenes, certified safety professionals on set, documented emergency medical protocols, adequate insurance coverage for all workers including daily contractors, and independent compliance audits before high-risk sequences are executed. The Film Workers Association of Maharashtra has demanded a standalone Film Production Safety Act modelled on California's Title 8 safety regulations, pointing to multiple preventable deaths over the past decade as evidence that the industry's self-regulatory instinct has failed.
One enforcement lever already exists in the regulatory architecture and could be activated without new legislation: the Central Board of Film Certification. Empowering the CBFC to require a safety compliance certificate as a condition of certification would create an incentive that reaches every production seeking theatrical release. A film that cannot demonstrate it ran a documented safety regime during production cannot be certified. That single change would concentrate minds at the budgeting stage, before a single frame is shot.
The OTT Asymmetry
The stakes have risen as Indian cinema's commercial footprint has expanded. Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and other international platforms now fund Indian originals at scale. Those platforms operate under the safety compliance frameworks of their home jurisdictions — frameworks that include detailed onset safety protocols, production insurance requirements, and documented risk-assessment procedures that their legal teams enforce contractually. When an Indian production receives international funding, the contractual language around worker safety can create obligations that Indian law does not independently impose.
This regulatory asymmetry cuts two ways. For Indian producers working with international partners, it generates contractual ambiguity and potential liability exposure in jurisdictions with more aggressive enforcement. For international partners evaluating Indian productions, it introduces a due-diligence burden that simpler, clearer Indian regulation would eliminate. India's bilateral co-production treaties — currently active with several countries including the UK and Australia — are the natural forum for aligning safety standards, which would simultaneously protect workers and streamline the financing relationships that Indian cinema increasingly depends on.
Economist and media policy researcher Usha Raman has noted that Indian film production's shift toward large-scale action sequences and CGI-integrated practical stunts has outpaced the regulatory framework inherited from a simpler production era. The industry's ambition has grown faster than its governance. The gap shows up not in boardrooms but on the bodies of the workers who execute those ambitions at ground level.
The Soft-Power Calculation
Indian cinema is one of the country's most effective instruments of cultural reach — from Bollywood's global theatrical footprint to the regional language films now finding international audiences through streaming. That soft-power projection carries a reputational dimension. An industry that cannot demonstrate basic occupational safety compliance comparable to Hollywood's SAG-AFTRA agreements or the UK's Health and Safety Executive film guidelines sends a signal to international partners, insurers, and co-producers that the operating environment carries elevated risk.
The domestic argument is, if anything, more urgent. The Labour Codes that India has spent years drafting carry an explicit commitment to extending social protection to unorganised sector workers. The informal daily-wage worker on a film set — invisible to most regulatory frameworks, excluded from most formal contracts, and the first person to absorb the consequences of a safety failure — is exactly the worker those Codes were meant to reach. Every production cycle that passes without sector-specific rules under the Occupational Safety Code is a cycle in which that commitment remains on paper.
The death on the Love & War set will generate a few weeks of industry conversation, some calls for voluntary reform, and then the next production will begin. That cycle has repeated itself after every major on-set incident for years. The mechanism to break it — sector-specific rules, CBFC certification leverage, mandatory audit requirements — sits inside an existing regulatory architecture waiting to be used. What is missing is not the law's capacity. It is the decision to act.
