The Tiruvallur Ammonia Leak and the Gendered Political Economy of India’s Seafood Export Industry

India’s seafood industry has grown rapidly over the last decade. According to the Ministry of Trade and IndustryIndia exported 19,72,018 tonnes (MT) of seafood worth ₹73,890.46 crore (US$8.46 billion) in 2025-26, the highest ever export volume. Beyond these record numbers, there is a labor regime that is predominantly supported by women workers, whose low wages, precarious employment and dangerous working conditions remain largely invisible in the success narratives of export-oriented economic growth.

In the early hours of June 21, 2026, an ammonia gas leak ripped through the manufacturing plant of Peter & Paul Seafood Export Company, a private company near Periyapalayam in Tiruvallur district of Tamil Nadu. Ammonia is a key component in the cooling/refrigeration process and can be life-threatening if inhaled in high concentrations. As temperatures rose and pressure built up in the system, an ammonia line ruptured and the toxic gas quickly spread throughout the first floor of the unit. Significantly, the women’s living quarters were also on the first floor, where around 120 migrant workers – mainly from Assam, Odisha and Jharkhand – lived. The leak led to death 18 women and 80 people were hospitalized, several of whom were on ventilators. The Tamil Nadu government has announced a compensation of ₹2 lakh to the family of each deceased worker and the Odisha government has added ex-gratia payments of ₹10 lakh. An investigation was initiated and FIRs were lodged.

What happened in Tiruvallur was not a freak accident, but rather an expression of a work system that was deliberately built on gendered precarity. This requires an investigation into how gender, caste, migration status and neglect of regulations contributed to the women’s deaths; they were structural prerequisites for them.

When the factory follows the women home

One detail deserves more attention than it has received so far: the deceased workers were not working when the leak occurred. They slept in their living quarters on a Sunday, their scheduled day off, after completing a 12-hour shift. Her exposure was not an industrial accident in the traditional sense; This was a consequence of the restriction to factory-owned accommodation within the industrial site.

Their proximity to the leak reveals a lot about how migrant women’s work in India’s seafood export sector is organized. Workers are often housed within or immediately adjacent to the facilities in which they work, blurring the boundaries between life and work. Al Jazeera report Investigations into similar shrimp processing plants in Andhra Pradesh found that migrant women were only allowed to leave the factory premises once a week for a few hours under the supervision of a contractor. The women described the exploitative conditions: no pay for overtime, no health insurance and under constant surveillance by cameras, trapped in what felt like an “open prison.” Legal experts have pointed out that this type of detention could reach the threshold of forced labor under India’s Bonded Labor Abolition Act, as restricting their freedom of movement is a sign of coercion and not just a facilitation of confinement.

The merging of workplace and living space can be understood through Tithi Bhattarcharya Theory of social reproduction (SRT), which argues that capitalism depends not only on the extraction of labor during production, but also on the systems that sustain workers’ bodies and their ability to continue working. Here, employers not only regulate women’s work within the processing unit, but also control the conditions under which this work is reproduced. If the home is inextricably linked to the danger zone, the “day off” does not provide protection for women, since recovery itself takes place in the same risk environment.

The gendered foundations of India’s seafood export economy

More than 75% of the Workers in the seafood industry In India it is women and the industry contributes 1% to India’s GDP. Frozen shrimp is the country’s largest export and the United States is its largest buyer. Shrimp processors have gender-specific roles, Benoy Peter, executive director of the Center for Migration and Inclusive Development (CMID) said that recruiters often target young girls because their “nimble fingers” are seen as well-suited to seafood work that involves peeling, deheading, freezing and packaging shrimp. These workers stand in extreme positions for hours cold environments because the temperature must be kept at 4 degrees Celsius. After the accident, a worker shared that the work was physically demanding and resulted in recurring headaches, back pain, bacterial infections, skin diseases and urinary tract infections due to lack of access to toilets – while wages remained relatively low – around ₹12,000 to ₹15,000 per month.

Feminist economist Naila Kabeer has examined how capitalism relies on gender inequalities at work. Kabeer shows that export-oriented industries consistently recruit women because they are perceived as a source of flexible, compliant and compliant companies inexpensive labor. Non-contractual employment, low wages, inadequate workplace protections and limited bargaining power are deliberate conditions that make them profitable businesses. The seafood export sector shows how global supply chains create value through the systematic exploitation of women’s labor while shifting production risks onto them.

Intersectionality and the political economy of work

Anti-Caste Feminist Scholars Sharmila Rege argued that caste and gender cannot be analyzed separately as Dalit women’s work experiences are essentially shaped by both. Dangerous, poorly paid and unsafe work is disproportionately carried out by women from historically marginalized caste communities. The incident reveals the structural inequalities that determine who is recruited into dangerous jobs and who ultimately suffers the consequences of unsafe working conditions. The women affected were predominantly young Adivasi migrant workers whose experiences were shaped by the intersecting forces of gender, caste, class, age and migration status.

Of the eighteen workers who died, fifteen were from Odisha, two from Assam and one from Jharkhand. The majority were teenagers from the Juang community – a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group (PVTG) in Keonjhar district, Odisha, which has historically relied on forest-based livelihoods and subsistence farming. According to the Indian ExpressIn the village of Rangamatia in Odisha, where two of the deceased workers live, the infrastructure is severely deficient. There are no proper roads in the village, there is only one school up to grade 5, it is 40 kilometers from the nearest hospital and until last year it had no mobile phone connection. Poverty, unemployment and the lack of sustainable livelihood opportunities drove these young women 1,500 to 3,000 kilometers from their homes in search of regular wage work. Their migration was facilitated by informal networks of relatives and labor brokers who placed agricultural workers in distant industrial jobs.

Odisha Labor Officers Investigation revealed that several workers were recruited using fake or borrowed Aadhaar documents and that some workers were minors. Employment agent Srikanta Juanga, who reportedly facilitated the employment in Odisha, is absconding following the incident. These migration routes reproduced conditions of dependence and vulnerability. According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), most workers in India’s shrimp processing industry are recruited through contractors and are not directly employed at the processing unit. This subcontracting model allows companies to avoid responsibility for providing health insurance, provident funds, social security and labor law compliance. Such agreements weaken accountability mechanisms and make migrant workers dependent on intermediaries for basic protection.

Corporate negligence and failure

There is no shortage of laws in India that should have prevented this. According to the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020, employers are required to ensure a safe working environment, welfare facilities and adequate protective measures in establishments where hazardous processes are carried out. According to The News Minute, workers had previously reported recurring small leaks, but their concerns were dismissed, suggesting that company negligence. Housing workers on the same premises as an industrial refrigeration plant that processes ammonia raises the question of whether these obligations have been meaningfully taken into account. The Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act requires labor contractors to have a recruiting license. The worker’s report on the physically demanding conditions and lack of health insurance also highlights possible flaws in the 2020 Social Security Code, which aims to extend social protection, including health and employment benefits, to workers. The relatively low wages reported by workers require close scrutiny under the 2019 Wage Code, which guarantees statutory minimum wages and aims to reduce wage insecurity in vulnerable sectors. The goodwill payments from state governments now represent a reactive rather than a structural response. The tragedy reveals gaps between legal protection measures and the reality of employees’ lives.

The right to work without risk

A feminist response would go beyond mourning and financial compensation to structural demands: mandatory registration and documentation of all migrant workers, regardless of contractual agreements. Workers should be provided with separate accommodation away from dangerous industrial areas. There is a need for adequately staffed factory inspectors with the authority to shut down non-compliant plants rather than simply fining them after a tragedy. Freedom of movement and association – including the right to freedom of association – remain important for migrant workers to resist this type of exploitation.

These women should not be remembered as victims of an industrial tragedy; They were workers whose work supported their families and global communities, and they sought economic independence and dignity through employment. But even the system that depended on their work did not recognize their lives as equally worthy of protection.

Simran Dhingra is a recent graduate of the Geneva Graduate Institute. Her research interests lie at the intersections of gender, peace and migration. Her work examines how digital infrastructures reproduce power hierarchies, shape vulnerabilities, and influence policy responses at multilateral and institutional levels.