> I know this is going to be voted down. I’m always scared of how things get done here in India -- not because they are careless or trying to reduce cost -- but because of the utter lack of importance given to human lives
My experience in seeing how electrical and gas lines are handled casually in Pakistan is the same. For instance, there was a huge transformer enclosure with no doors on it and bare bus bars anyone could easily reach in and grab, a transformer for high-voltage AC to low voltage step down, serving a 300 unit apartment building, with children playing football in the parking area right next to it.
It's not really an India specific problem but really more widespread throughout many south asian developing nations.
What’s bizarre is how little professionals care about their safety.
In cities like Delhi, good electricians, plumbers, welders can make $1k+ a month - most of it tax free since they usually work in cash.
Yet, they will never buy any safety equipment for themselves. I’ve seen welders use cheap $5 sunglasses instead of buying protective visors.
There are new apartments coming up in my area, each of which is priced north of $500,000. Yet the laborers working on them don’t have even good quality plastic buckets or wheelbarrows to haul stuff around - they make do with burlap sacks and weave baskets.
I was also shocked when I visited at the inefficiency and lack of tools for workers comfort and safety in construction.
You would see people working under a flood light at night, with burlap sacks as you said, as well as manual tools that were sorely inequipped for the work they were doing.
It was almost like it was cheaper to just hire someone to beat concrete for 14 hrs/day with a household hammer, for the duration of their life, than to pay $5,000 for a jackhammer and progress 5X as fast.
> In cities like Delhi, good electricians, plumbers, welders can make $1k+ a month - most of it tax free since they usually work in cash.
Are you sure about that? That would work out to be nearly 10 LPA, which is a good 2-4 lakhs more than what a good electrician would earn in Mumbai, which is a city that is far more expensive to live in than Delhi
I've seen something not quite that dangerous but still pretty bad in downtown Toronto and I was quite amazed. One of those partially in-ground transformer boxes with the lids removed. What really got me about it is that it seemed that I was the only person that thought that this was kind of dangerous, everybody else thought it was just fine. And those things are old and in a crappy state of maintenance, enough so that they blow up with alarming regularity and when they do they spout flaming oil around them. You wouldn't get me to go near one.
My experience in seeing how electrical and gas lines are handled casually in Pakistan is the same. For instance, there was a huge transformer enclosure with no doors on it and bare bus bars anyone could easily reach in and grab, a transformer for high-voltage AC to low voltage step down, serving a 300 unit apartment building, with children playing football in the parking area right next to it.
It's not really an India specific problem but really more widespread throughout many south asian developing nations.