Workmen’s Compensation Act: Meaning & What Replaced It
Updated 4 min read
Definition
The Workmen’s Compensation Act, 1923 was the Indian law that made an employer pay for a workplace injury.
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What Is the Workmen’s Compensation Act?
Search for this Act today and you will find it everywhere except the statute book.
The Workmen’s Compensation Act, 1923 was the Indian law that made an employer pay for a workplace injury. It was later renamed the Employee’s Compensation Act, and section 164 of the Code on Social Security, 2020 then repealed it. The same duty now sits in Chapter VII of that Code.
The name on the search result is dead. The obligation behind it is not.
Where the Duty Sits Now
Section 74 of the Code on Social Security sets out when the employer must pay. The trigger and the limits both sit in one subsection.
| Point | What section 74 says |
|---|---|
| Trigger | Injury by accident, or a listed occupational disease |
| Connection | It must arise out of and in the course of employment |
| Who pays | The employer is liable |
| Floor | No liability if disablement lasts three days or less |
Four things matter when you work from the Code:
- Cover is narrower than every employee. For Chapter VII, employee means only the persons listed in the Second Schedule, plus anyone a government adds by notification. Read that Schedule before you assume a role is covered.
- The listed diseases moved. Occupational diseases now sit in the Third Schedule to the Code, so an old schedule reference points nowhere.
- Anything already done survives. Section 164 saves orders, notifications and actions taken under the repealed Act, so a claim begun earlier does not vanish.
- Employees’ State Insurance (ESI) establishments sit apart. Section 73(3) takes them outside that section’s accident-reporting duty. An employment injury there runs through the Employees’ State Insurance Corporation (ESIC). Our guide to the ESIC claim process walks through it.
Workmen’s Compensation Act vs the Code
People assume a repealed Act means a cancelled duty. It almost never does.
| Aspect | The 1923 Act | The Code |
|---|---|---|
| Status | Repealed | In force |
| Home | Its own Act | Chapter VII |
| Duty | Employer pays | Employer pays |
The duty did not go away. Only the place you look it up has changed.
Workmen’s Compensation Act Example
A packaging line in Kolkata (an example) has two injuries in March 2026. One operator is off for two days. Another is off for eleven weeks.
| Case | Days lost | Employer liable |
|---|---|---|
| Operator A | 2 | No, under the floor |
| Operator B | 77 | Yes |
Note: this is an invented example for illustration only. The business, dates and injuries are made up.
The three-day floor is the only part owners tend to remember, and they often remember it wrong. It turns on how long the disablement lasts, not on how serious the injury looked on the day. What you need on day one is the employment record: who was on shift, and what they were paid.
Why the Old Name Still Costs You
A policy that cites the 1923 Act is quoting a law that no longer exists. So is an insurance schedule, a contractor agreement or an induction pack that names it.
None of that voids your duty. But the section numbers, schedule references and forms in those documents now point at nothing. That is an awkward thing to find out while settling a claim. A warehouse in Bengaluru and a hospital laundry have the same paperwork problem as a factory.
The safer habit is to search your templates for the old name once, and fix what it returns. Our labour codes checklist covers the same problem across the other Acts the Codes repealed.
The Record a Compensation Claim Needs
A compensation claim turns on facts you should already hold: who was employed, on what wages, and from when. Attendo (formerly Petpooja Payroll) is a complete workforce management system for every kind of business. It keeps employee records and pay history in one place.
For the record-keeping underneath a claim, you can see how Attendo works. It does not work out injury compensation, and no software should decide that for you.