A systematic review of construction workers’ health and safety research in India

Abstract

Purpose
Construction workers’ health and safety (CWHS) research in India has not gained much attention among researchers. This study aims to review articles related to CWHS research in India using a science mapping approach.

Design/methodology/approach
A total number of 64 journal articles published between 2004 and 2019 were extracted from the Scopus database using keywords including “construction safety,” “occupational health,” “ergonomics in construction,” etc. VOSviewer software was used to examine the influential keywords, documents, sources and authors in the field of CWHS.

Findings
The study found that most of the current work focuses on safety management, safety climate, safety performance, musculoskeletal disorders and behavior-based safety. The result indicates no theoretical basis for the theories and learning methods for the existing studies.

Practical implications
The findings open up a research gap that researchers explore to enhance workers’ health and safety within the Indian construction environment.

Originality/value
The paper is the first article to provide a better understanding of current research in the field of CWHS in India by analyzing its growth through the science mapping approach.

Full text

A systematic review of
construction workers’health and
safety research in India
Vigneshkumar Chellappa
Department of Design, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati,
Guwahati, India
Vasundhara Srivastava
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences,
Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Guwahati, India, and
Urmi Ravindra Salve
Department of Design, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Guwahati, India
Abstract
Purpose –Construction workers’health and safety (CWHS) research in India has not gained much attention
among researchers. This study aims to review articles related to CWHS research in India using a science
mapping approach.
Design/methodology/approach –A total number of 64 journal articles published between 2004 and
2019 were extractedfrom the Scopus database using keywords including “construction safety,”“occupational
health,”“ergonomics in construction,”etc. VOSviewer software wasused to examine the influential keywords,
documents, sources andauthors in the field of CWHS.
Findings –The study found that most of the current work focuses on safety management, safety climate,
safety performance, musculoskeletal disorders and behavior-based safety. The result indicates no theoretical
basis for the theories and learning methods for the existing studies.
Practical implications –The findings open up a research gap that researchers explore to enhance
workers’health andsafety within the Indian construction environment.
Originality/value –The paper is the first article to provide a better understanding of current research in
the field of CWHS in India by analyzing its growth through the science mapping approach.
Keywords Bibliometric analysis, VOSviewer, Science mapping, Indian construction,
Workers health and safety
Paper type Literature review
Introduction
Construction workers’health and safety (CWHS) is a major social responsibility, and
achieving zero accidents at construction sites around the world is a challenging task. Nearly
60,000 fatal accidents happen globally each year at construction sites (International Labour
Organization (ILO), 2005). The construction sector in India employs approximately 31
million people and is the country’s biggest employer after agriculture (Construction Industry
Development Council (CIDC), 2005). The death rates in the construction sector were
significantly higher compared to other industries in India (ENS, 2017). The average
frequency rate of fatal accidents (FAFR; incidents/1,000 employees/year) for construction
industries in India is 15.8, which is 50 times higher than US construction industries’FAFR
JEDT
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Received 26 August2020
Revised 4 October2020
Accepted 16 November2020
Journal of Engineering, Design
and Technology
Vol. 19 No. 6, 2021
pp. 1488-1504
© Emerald Publishing Limited
1726-0531
DOI 10.1108/JEDT-08-2020-0345
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/1726-0531.htm

(CIDC, 2005). Also, one in every 2,000 construction workers suffered an injury or an accident
every day during their studies in India (Mahalingam and Levitt, 2007). This indicates that the
Indian construction sector’s safety practices still need to be improved to enhance workers’
health and safety. Research is being carried out in improving the safety performance in the
Indian construction industry by covering multiple areas such as ergonomics (Kathoch and
Mohan, 2019), safety program (Rajaprasad and Chalapathi, 2016) and safety performance
measurement (Patel and Jha, 2016a). In response to the growth of information
and communication technologies (ICT) in recent years, researchers have started using the
GIS (i.e. geographical information system) to enhance safety planning in construction (Kumar
and Bansal, 2016;Kumar and Bansal, 2018). However, CWHS research in India has not
obtained adequate attention from the research community. As there is a lack of studies
discussing workers’health and safety issues in the Indian construction sector, now this is the
right time for a comprehensive scientific analysis of the current literature on CWHS in India
and to look for new knowledge for futuredirections of research.
According to He et al. (2017), reviewing the literature is a convenient method to better
understand the particular research field. Multiple existing review-based studies (Swuste
et al., 2012;Mohammadi et al.,2018;Hu et al.,2011) on construction safety are performed
manually, which could be prone to subjectivity and prejudice (Hosseini et al.,2018). To
tackle this problem ofsubjectivity, a science mapping approach has been used in the domain
of construction management to analyze the origins of articles, co-authorship network,
journal citations and keywords in the research field such as off-site construction (Jin et al.,
2018), public–private partnership (Song et al., 2016) and fall from height (Vigneshkumar and
Salve, 2020). Such articles are accompanied by the assumption that the science mapping
approach will help to take a wider analysis approach, with more in-depth discussion
included. There is no established study adopting a CWHS literature review that addresses
these issues mentioned above in India. In this research, therefore, the science mapping
method was implemented to identify research focus on workers’health and safety by
reviewing the journal articles published within the construction field in India. The study
objectives were to:
examine the journals, authors, co-authorship and keywords in the CWHS domain;
examine the current research themes in the field of CWHS; and
recognize research gaps and recommend future directions in CWHS domain.
The present study could assist researchers in understanding the body of knowledge and
open path for future research to fill a significant research gap.
Research methodology
This study aimed to ascertain the key areas of concentration in published articles on
workers’health and safety (H&S) within the Indian construction field. Bibliometric search in
Scopus was the first step of the review. Although other vital scholarly databases were
available, such as Web of Science and Google Scholar, Scopus was chosen because of its
broader coverage (Hosseini et al., 2018). Also, researchers mostly adopt Scopus for collecting
literature (Guz and Rushchitsky, 2009) and has been used in most systematic review studies
(Chandegani et al.,2013;Jin et al., 2018;Zheg et al.,2016).
The following keywords were input to search literature published in Scopus:
TITLE-ABS-KEY (“construction safety”OR “occupational health”OR “safety
management’OR “construction accidents”OR “fall from height”OR “accident prevention”
OR “ergonomics in construction”OR “India.”
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safety research
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AND
“Workers health and safety”).
Conducted in February 2020, initially, 118 documents were found in the sample with
stated keywords. Additionally, rules for advanced search was also set, i.e. “before 2020”for
the timeframe, “Article”was the document type, “Journals”was the source type and
“English”was the language. Although there were other sources, such as conference papers,
the chosen ones were the journal articles, because of their reliable sources of knowledge
(Ramos-Rodríguez and Ruíz-Navarro, 2004). Although some articles used the term
“construction safety”in the abstract, they do not focus on workers’safety in Indian
construction. Similar articles were excluded from the sample. It should be noticed that
articles from other countries that focus on safety issues in the Indian construction industry
were also considered in this study. The scope of this review-based study focused only on
human-centered safety management and excluded other safety issues such as material or
structural safety of buildings (Peng, 2017) that do not directly focus on construction
employees’health and safety. Finally, a total of 64 journal documents were extracted after
careful refining. The framework adopted for the research is shown in Figure 1.
The results of this study are presented based on the publications per year, publications
per document sources, publications per author, most-cited documents, keyword co-
occurrence and co-authorship network. The science mapping tool, VOSviewer developed by
Van Eck and Waltman (2010), was used in this study to develop the co-occurrence network
maps. Although there were other science mapping tools such as Gephi (Bastian et al.,2009)
and CiteSpace (Chen, 2016), VOSviewer provides distance-based visualizations and more
suitable for visualizing large networks (Van Eck and Waltman, 2014). More information
about VOSviewer and its working mechanism can be found in Van Eck and Waltman (2014).
Results and discussion
Publications per year
Figure 2 shows the number of articles related to workers’H&S in Indian construction-
related fields over time. It should be noticed that no studies were found in this domain before
2004. As shown in Figure 2, it is observed that there was no significant growth of articles
published in 2004 and up to 2013. Then, there is a rise in number of articles from 2013 to
2016, with two publications in 2013 growing to ten publications in 2016. Although there are
slight deviations in recent years, it is anticipated that more studies will be carried out and
published in CWHS in India, which is an everlasting study area in the construction
management domain.
Figure 1.
Framework of
research
Analyses
SCOPUS;
Keywords
Refine search using
Document type;
Source type;
language
Search database 118 Initial
extracted papers
64 extracted
papers VOSviewer
- Publications per document source
- Publications per scholars
- Highly cited publications
- Network of co-authorship
- Co-occurrence network of keywords
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Publications per document source
The sources of extracted articles were also summarized. Within the evaluated time frame,
64 extracted articles were published in 45 different journals. The journals with at least
two published articles and two citations of journals within the research scope are listed in
Table 1. It is found that Journal of Construction Engineering and Management and
Journal of Management in Engineering, with 42 and 32 citations are the most productive
journals in CWHS research in India. This is followed by International Journal of
Industrial Ergonomics (three articles, 22 citations), International Journal of Construction
Management (three articles, 16 citations), International Journal of Civil Engineering and
Technology (seven articles, 12 citations), International Journal of Industrial and System
Engineering (two articles, nine citations) and Scientific World Journal (two articles, five
citations).
Highly cited publications
Assessing the extracted articles to see highly cited papers and their focus area is
essential to understand the researches in CWHS research in India. Out of 64 extracted
documents, 14 articles were cited a minimum number of ten times, as seen in Table 2.
The study of Bansal (2011), focusing on GIS application in construction safety
planning, has received more citations than the other documents. It is seen in Table 2
that most of the documents that focused on conventional H&S research include safety
behavior (Patel and Jha,2015a, 2016b), workload assessment (Maiti, 2008), safety
climate (Patel and Jha, 2015b), safety performance (Patel and Jha, 2016a) and hazard
identification (Balasubramanian and Prasad, 2007a).
Figure 2.
Number of articles
per year from 2004–
2019
3
0
22
1
00
3
2
24
7
10
8
11
9
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
Table 1.
Most influential
journal sources
Journal title No. of documents Total citations
International Journal of Civil Engineering and Technology 712
Journal of Construction Engineering and Management 342
International Journal of Construction Management 316
International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics 322
Journal of Management in Engineering 232
Scientific World Journal 25
International Journal of Industrial and System Engineering 29
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Table 2.
Top cited articles in
CWHS in India
Article Title Citations
Bansal (2011) Application of geographic information systems in
construction safety planning
91
Maiti (2008) Workload assessment in building construction related
activities in India
33
Patel and Jha (2015a} Neural network model for the prediction of safe work
behavior in construction projects
26
Rajaprasad and Chalapathi (2015) Factors influencing implementation of OHSAS 18001 in
Indian construction organizations: interpretive structural
modeling approach
24
Hasan and Jha (2013) Safety incentive and penalty provisions in Indian
construction projects and their impact on safety
performance
19
Patel and Jha (2016a) Structural equation modeling for relationship-based
determinants of safety performance in construction
projects
16
Patel and Jha (2015b) Neural network approach for safety climate prediction 16
Kumar and Bansal (2016) A GIS-based methodology for safe site selection of a
building in a hilly region
14
Shankar et al. (2012) Assessment of occupational health practices in Indian
industries: A neural network approach
12
Sivaprakash and Kanchana (2018) A study on statutory provisions for construction safety in
India
12
Kumar and Bansal (2018) Use of GIS in locating TFs safely on a construction site in
hilly regions
12
Patel and Jha (2016b} Evaluation of construction projects based on the safe work
behavior of co-employees through a neural network model
11
Balasubramanian and Prasad
(2007a)
Manual Bar Bending-an occupational hazard for
construction workers in developing nations
11
Maiti and Ray (2004a} Determination of maximum acceptable weight of lift by
adult Indian female workers
10
Table 3.
Number of
publications per
scholar
Authors Affiliation Documents Citations
Jha, K. N. Indian Institute of Technology Delhi 6 93
Patel, D. A. Sardar Vallabhai Patel National Institute of Technology
Surat/Indian Institute of Technology Delhi
574
Maiti, R. Indian Institute of Science Bangalore 5 65
Bansal, V. K National Institute of Technology Hamirpur 3 117
Ray, G. G Indian Institute of Technology Bombay 3 20
Balasubramanian, V. Indian Institute of Technology Madras/Indian Institute of
Technology Bombay
320
Rajaprasad, S. V. S. Koneru Lakshmaiah University 2 25
Kumar, S. Rajiv Gandhi Government Engineering College, Nagrota
Bagwan
226
Sivaprakash, P A.S.L. Pauls College of Engineering and Technology,
Coimbatore
217
Kanchana, S RVS Technical Campus, Coimbatore 2 17
Chalapathi, P. V. Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai 2 25
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Publications per scholars and network of co-authorship
The assessed extracted documents had 125 scholars in terms of authorships that include
both corresponding authors and co-authors. A minimum documents number and citations
number were set at two and ten, respectively, and a total of 11 scholars were revealed as a
result. It is seen in Table 3 that the top scholars who have published in the workers’H&S in
the Indian construction-related field and are highly cited are Jha, K. N. (six papers, 93
citations) and Patel, D. A. (five papers, 74 citations). Although Bansal, V. K has published
only three articles, those articles were cited 117 times.
The six clusters of co-authorship are visualized in Figure 3. The earliest set of influential
scholars who started publishing in CWHS in India were Maiti, R., Ray, G.G., and
Balasubramian, V. These co-authorships existed from 2004–2008 and are deep blue color in
the map. However, Jha, K. N., Patel, D. A., Rajaprasad, S. V. S., and Chalapathi, P. V. are the
most recent scholars publishing in CWHS in India. These co-authorships existed after 2015
and are the yellow color on the map.
Research focus base on co-occurring keywords
Keywords describe the core contents of published articles (Su and Lee, 2010), and therefore,
it is significant to clustering of keywords into different topics that can be used to explain the
concentration field for this existing research works (Aghimien et al.,2019). By choosing
“Authors keywords’and “Full counting,”and by adopting the co-occurrence minimum
number of keywords at 2in VOSviewer, 31 out of 211 keywords were initially chosen.
General keywords were removed, such as “Indian construction,”“workers’safety,”
“construction safety,”“occupational health and safety,”“construction industry,”etc. by
performing further analysis. Finally, 20 keywords were revealed from all 64 extracted
publications and are visualized in Figure 4. Keywords such as “safety management,”“safety
climate,”“safety performance,”“construction management”and “behavior”have been more
often used in past research of CWHS in India. It should be noted that the connection lines in
Figure 4 show the inter-closeness among a keywords pair. For instance, fatal accidents are
closely related to behavior that covers the research focusing on improving workers’safety
behavior through an effective tool in Indian construction projects (Chockalingam and
Sornakumar, 2011b). The keyword “hazard”covers hazard evaluation and is found closely
connected with the accident, as it is one of the most common safety issues at the
Figure 3.
Visualization of co-
authorship network
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construction site (Patel and Jha, 2017). Keywords were grouped into several clusters and are
visualized in Figure 4. Generally, keywords within the same clusters have higher co-
occurrence. For instance, safety behavior is frequently co-studied with a safety climate in the
same article. The size of the font points out the keyword frequency that has been studied in
the chosen literature. Observations of Figure 4 could lead to the subsequent keywords
cluster that characterizes the mainstream research direction in CWHS in India:
Cluster 1 –musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs). Cluster 1 –Musculoskeletal disorders
(MSDs) is the long-lasting research topic in the domain of CWHS in India. According to
Middlesworth (2019), MSDs are injuries and disorders that affect the human
musculoskeletal system or body’s movement. Multiple studies (Maiti and Ray, 2004a,2004b,
2004c;Maiti and Bagchi, 2006) have been focusing on developing an equation to estimate the
maximum load limit for manual lifting for Indian adult female construction workers. To
emphasize the risk factors of construction activities, Maiti (2008) assessed the workload in
building construction among female workers. The result shows that the workers were not
getting enough rest at the workplace, and hence, modifications of work methods were
suggested to compensate for occupational health-related issues. Similarly, MSDs among
workers in the process of bar bending in construction was assessed using electromyogram
(EMG) (Balasubramanian and Prasad, 2007b). Likewise, several ergonomics techniques and
instruments, including Rapid Entire Body Assessment (REBA), Rapid Upper Limb
Assessment (RULA), Nordic Musculoskeletal Questionnaire (NMQ), etc., were used to assess
the MSDs risk level in various construction activities, such as head lifting (Kathoch and
Mohan, 2019), shuttering, granite cutting, plastering and brickwork (Kulkarni and Devalkar,
2019), bar bending (Balasubramanian and Prasad, 2006), plastering and manual material
handling (Kathiravan and Gunarani, 2018), loading and unloading (Chatterjee and Sahu,
2018) and loading and reinforcement (Chakraborty et al.,2018). On the other side, Neeraja
et al. (2014) used statistical tools to recognize the risk factors related to MSDs; Satapathy
et al. (2018) applied fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to understand the reason for the
discomfort faced by carpenters, plumbers, welders and masons by studying their body
movements and body parts; Ashtekar et al. (2019) examined the effectiveness of personal
cooling garments (PCG) concerning workers’physiological responses in a hot environment;
Figure 4.
Visualization of co-
occurring author
keywords
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Karthik and Rao (2019) and Chinnadurai et al. (2016) investigated the human parameters
influence on labor productivity in construction.
Cluster 2 –safety management system. Abudayyeh et al. (2006) pointed out the relationship
between safety performance and management commitment. Safety performance could be
improved by an effective safety program that integrates management commitment, training
and education (Chen and Jin, 2012). Multiple studies have been carried out to examine the
critical factors within the safety management program to explore their correlation. For
instance, Rajaprasad and Chalapathi (2015) identified and tested nine critical factors
influencing the success of a construction safety system. Similar studies examining the
factors for the successful implementation of the framework of safety management can be
found in Chockalingam and Sornakumar (2012),Samuel and Munagala (2016),Muthu et al.
(2017),Dinesh et al. (2017),Benny and Jaishree (2017),Santhiya and Muthu (2017),Nair and
Vivek (2019) and Ragul and Rathinakumar (2019). Multiple studies (Kumar et al.,2013;
Kumar et al., 2015;Rajaprasad and Chalapathi, 2016) developed a safety education program
to educate the workers and employees to avoid hazards at construction sites.
Cluster 3 –safety climate and safety culture. Existing studies have been focusing on
identifying the factors influencing safety climate or safety culture (Beriha et al.,2012;Patel
and Jha, 2016b), as well as linking them to the measurement of safety performance
(Saravanan, 2016;Patel and Jha, 2016a;Shanmugapriya and Subramanian, 2016;Hasan and
Jha, 2013). Recently, Patel and Jha (2015b) adopted neural network models for the prediction
of safety climate. Workers have been given greater attention within safety climate, such as
perceptions (Kamal et al.,2017), safety compliance (Tabish and Jha, 2015) and worker
behavior (Patel and Jha, 2015a). Multiple studies (Deepak et al.,2019;Chockalingam and
Sornakumar, 2011a;Deepak and Mahesh, 2019) have been addressing the relationship
between safety culture and knowledge management. For instance, Deepak et al. (2019) stated
that knowledge management is ignored when creating a safety culture and therefore
developed a knowledge-based safety culture for the construction industry (Deepak and
Mahesh, 2019). Research on safety culture has not just focused on the organizational level,
but also within the workers (Raja et al., 2016) and engineers (Vidhyasri and Brahim, 2014).
Cluster 4 –information and communication technologies (ICT). In the past two decades,
the adoption of ICT in the global construction industry for safety has been raised. GIS has
displayed a tremendous role in the safety planning process in existing studies. For example,
Bansal (2011) used GIS-based navigable three-dimensional (3D) animation in the process of
construction safety planning to facilitate a better understanding of the sequence of
construction and forecast the hazardous situations within the planned sequence; Kumar and
Bansal (2016) developed a methodology using GIS for safe site selection of the building at
hilly regions by identifying unique safety aspects, including overhead electric supply lines
that could trigger workers’accidents. Inappropriate location of temporary facilities at the
construction workplace may lead to collisions between plant, workers, equipment and fall of
materials that may result in accidents (ILO, 1995). To avoid such cases, Kumar and Bansal
(2018) developed a GIS-based framework to locate temporary facilities safely on the
construction site in hilly regions. In another study, Izumi et al. (2014) applied on-site
visualization (OSV) sensors, a monitoring system to visually represent the buildings to
everyone around in real time, including site engineers, workers and even people around the
site. This study indicated that the site workers became aware of the conditions based on the
lights emitted from the sensors and know-how to act according to the light colors.
Cluster 5 –hazard recognition, accident causation and risk mitigation. According to
Pereira et al. (2018), workers’failure to recognize hazards and negligence of threats is the
highest-priority mishap predecessors. Earlier studies have been focusing on determining
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health hazards associated with activities (Sellappan and Janakiraman, 2014;Nag et al.,2016;
Mohankumar et al.,2018;Neeharika et al.,2018) and the causes of accidents (Kanchana et al.,
2015;Gaganpreetkaur and Singhal, 2018;Patil and Kokatanur, 2018). More recent studies
(Patel and Jha, 2017;Kurinji et al., 2018;Jana et al.,2019) emphasize fuzzy logic as a decision-
making approach in classifying and assessing the safety risks.
Research focus base on the year of publication
Different years of publication of the co-occurring keywords are visualized in Figure 5.Itis
observed that before 2016, the literature focused more on labor and personal issues, which
were used to forecasting and monitoring the performance of safety in construction projects
(Patel and Jha, 2016b). The most influential keywords evident in this time frame include
“GIS”and “neural network.”It shows that these advanced decision-making tools
have gained more attention among researchers in recent years, stressing safety
climate importance (Patel and Jha,2015a, 2015b) and safe site planning (Bansal, 2011). These
keywords are visualized in purple color in Figure 5. From 2017 to 2018, research focused on
hazards and workers’behavior, which were used to enhance safety performance (Patel and
Jha, 2016a). These are depicted in green color in Figure 5. Knowledge management, risk
assessment and ergonomics are the emerging keywords, gaining more comprehensive
application and research in construction H&S management in India. These keywords are
visualized in green yellow and dark yellow color in Figure 5.
Discussion
This review-based research shows that the most existing studies focused on assessing the
level of risk for MSDs associated with different construction trade workers. However, these
studies were limited to carpenters, painters, masons, welders (Satapathy et al.,2018) and bar
benders (Balasubramanian and Prasad, 2006). Besides these studies, future research should
emphasize designs such as designing hand tools, workstations and personal protective
equipment (PPE), which could help change the work method for reducing the MSDs risk
level. ICTs are being adopted globally in construction projects to examine the relationship
between workers’behavior patterns and the workplace environment (Yang et al.,2016;
Kurien et al., 2018). However, such studies are not carried out in India, and therefore, it is
recommended that this should be implemented in India based on the nature of research.
Figure 5.
Visualization of year
of publication of the
co-occurring
keywords
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Some current studies focused on developing the safety education program to enhance
workers’and employees’ability to identify hazards at the site. As evidenced in the review,
safety education programs were developed commonly for all trade workers and project
types. In addition to these results, safety programs for different types of projects (i.e.
residential, commercial and industrial) and trade workers who are engaged in dangerous
activities (i.e. working at height) should be established, as falls from height (FFH) have the
highest rate among construction accidents in India (Jain and Matharu, 2017). An agent such
as a scaffold is a risky task that may result in workers’deaths at the construction workplace
(Wong et al.,2009). In India, however, such a study does not occur by implementing safety
management systems for workers associated with this agent. Meanwhile, Kassem et al.
(2017) stated that the workers’ability could be enhanced by learning through a virtual
environment than conventional safety programs.
Some researchers created a knowledge-based safety culture for construction projects.
However, the development of a prototype for the safety knowledge management and tool for
accident prevention has been lacking in existing studies. It is well known that ICTs in the
pre-construction phase of construction projects can assist workers’safety. Until construction
begins, there should be a method for integrating workers’health and safety (e.g. risks and
control measures) of specific construction projects gathered from professional practitioners’
knowledge. A safety officer is also kept up to date with workplace health and safety as well
as work progress. Based on the project types, knowledge-based ontology could be
established for classifying the safety risk of different activities.
Most of the existing literature did not embrace the theories and methods of learning. This
limits the CWHS literature’s ability to provide organizations with technically endorsed
guidelines and techniques to improve the learning capacity to prevent accidents at the
workplace. Learning from investigating the accident is an emerging research topic in
construction safety management. Interdisciplinary research methods and learning science
theories should be adopted to learn from the incidents effectively. For instance, according to
Drupsteen et al. (2013), learning from incidents includes many steps, including examining
and evaluating accidents, preparing strategies, intervening and assessing. These steps could
be adopted while carrying out accident studies in India. It would also be useful to adopt
some learning from the incident models for accident study. For instance, Lindberg et al.
(2010) built a CHAIN learning model to disseminate and implement preventive actions.
Although design for safety (DfS) has been recognized in many countries for
enhancing construction safety throughout the project lifecycle (Behm, 2012;Çeçen et al.,
2013), this concept has yet to be adopted in the Indian context. DfS has a tremendous
ability to design or mitigate the safety risk during construction and renovation and
maintenance (Nadhim et al.,2016). Studies applying ICTs such as GIS have mainly
focused on safe site selection of construction projects in hilly regions (Kumar and
Bansal,2016, 2018). ICT-based platforms could be prolonged to multiple different
projects, such as residential, commercial and institutional. While other ICT techniques
such as building information modeling (BIM) (Zhang et al., 2013) and sensor-based
technology (Yang et al., 2016) have been used to improve safety management in the
worldwide construction industry, the current literature does not discuss this type of
application. The applications of these technologies should not be restricted to academic
research, but should also focus on the evolution of technology from research to real-life
projects. Researchers should also look after policies, laws and guidelines when
implementing these innovative health and safety technologies for employees and
workers.
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Conclusion
This study aims to identify research emphasis in CWHS within the Indian construction field
through a science mapping approach. The study identified a key field of concentration in
CWHS-related research within an Indian construction environment based on extracted journal
articles from the Scopus database published over a period of 16 years. In the recent decade, the
area has attracted a great deal of interest, spawning many studies since 2013. In the following
years, more studies can be forecasted in the CWHS research domain in India. Productive
journals in CWHS research within India were found to be in the International Journal of Civil
Engineering and Technology,Journal of Construction Engineering and Management and
International Journal of Construction Management. Authors’keywords within the CWHS field
revealed mainstream topics, including safety management, safety climate, behavior and safety
performance. Analysis of co-author recognized influential scholars’analysis in the CWHS
research community. Jha K. N. was identified as the most productive scholar with the highest
number of documents. Although not with the maximum number of documents, Bansal, V. K.
was found with the highest influence citation per document by applying GIS in safety
planning. According to the publication year, studies in recent years have found that greater
attention has been paid to safety knowledge in safety management. Based on the findings, it
can be concluded that the existing studies lack a theoretical base for the theories and methods
of learning. The discussion revealed that future CWHS research directions could be in the
following areas to achieve a holistic approach to resolving CWHS issues:
examining the relationship between workers’behavior pattern and workplace
environment;
designing hand tools, work stations or PPE to change the work method for reducing
MSDs risk level among workers;
adopting safety education programs that could enhance the workers’abilities in
protecting them from incidents or injuries;
creating a knowledge-based ontology for classifying the safety risk of various
activities based on project levels;
carrying out accident studies to understand the in-depth knowledge of accident
causes; and
applying a single or combined ICT tool throughout the project lifecycle to enhance
workers’safety performance.
This study’sfindings and recommendations provide insightful signs for safety
academicians and researchers to carry out futureresearch on CWHS in India.
The present study was limited to a selection of the literature sample. Firstly, the journal
articles published only in Scopus were extracted by omitting the other sources of articles
such as book chapters, magazines and conference proceedings. Secondly, non-English
journal articles were potentially excluded. While there is a considerable overlap between
Scopus and other databases, further research could be carried out using other databases or
combining one or more to compare results and have a broader view of the research domain
by a large selection of sample size than what is available in the existing research.
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Corresponding author
Vigneshkumar Chellappa can be contacted at: vigneshkumarchellappa@gmail.com
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