Ardeshir H. Bhiwandiwala v State of Bombay (1962)

Everything in the Factories Act hangs on one question: is this place a factory? If it is, the whole apparatus of the Act follows — registration and licensing, a manager, health and safety provisions, hours, leave, penalties. If it is not, the Act is silent and the workers are outside its protection.

Ardeshir is the leading Supreme Court authority on two of the three limbs of that question. It holds that "premises" includes open land, with no building and no wall in sight, and that converting sea water into salt by sun and wind is a "manufacturing process". A salt works spread over hundreds of acres of open ground is therefore a factory.

It is also the standard illustration of the purposive construction of welfare legislation: where a definition can bear a wide or a narrow meaning, the court takes the reading that serves the protective object. That links it directly to Bangalore Water Supply v A. Rajappa (1978) on "industry".

The appellant owned and worked a salt works on a large tract of land — a few hundred acres — near the sea in Bombay State.

The process was simple and largely natural. Sea water was let in through sluice gates and channels into reservoirs, and from there into a series of shallow pans or beds. Sun and wind evaporated it; the brine grew denser as it was moved from bed to bed; in the final crystallising beds the salt formed. Workers regulated the sluices, watched the density of the brine, moved it between pans, scraped and collected the crystals, heaped them, and packed and despatched the salt.

None of this happened inside a building. The work was in the open, on land partly flooded by design. The required number of workers was employed, and that limb of s. 2(m) was not the contested point.

The appellant was prosecuted under the Factories Act for working the salt works without complying with its requirements. His defence went to the whole prosecution: the salt works is not a factory at all. The courts below were against him; he appealed.

1. Do open lands, without buildings, amount to "premises including the precincts thereof" within s. 2(m)?
2. Does the conversion of sea water into salt by solar evaporation, assisted by human labour, amount to a "manufacturing process" within s. 2(k) — in particular, is it "treating or adapting any article or substance with a view to its use, sale, transport, delivery or disposal"?
3. Is the salt works therefore a factory?

For the appellant. "Premises" is not an unlimited word. The Act speaks of "premises including the precincts thereof", and precincts are the spaces enclosed by or attached to a building. The phrase therefore contemplates a building with its enclosed surrounds — a place with a boundary, a door and a roof. A few hundred acres of open, partly flooded land is not "premises" in any ordinary sense.

On s. 2(k), no manufacture takes place at a salt works. The salt is already present in the sea water; nature separates it. A process in which human agency merely lets water in and later collects what the sun has deposited is not "making", "treating" or "adapting" anything. And the Act was aimed at the hazards of machinery and industrial buildings — heat, dust, fumes, moving parts — none of which exists on a salt pan.

For the State. "Premises" is a generic word covering open land, land with buildings, or buildings alone. The words "including the precincts thereof" enlarge the expression; they do not cut it down, and they do not require that every premises have precincts. On s. 2(k), a substance of no commercial use — sea water — is treated and adapted until it becomes a marketable commodity, salt. Human labour, aided by natural forces, brings that about, and s. 2(k) is deliberately artificial and wide. Workers on a salt pan need the Act's protection as much as workers in a shed.

The appeal was dismissed. The salt works is a factory.

• "Premises" is a generic term meaning open land, or land with buildings, or buildings alone. The word is not confined to structures.
• "Including the precincts thereof" is a phrase of enlargement, not of restriction. It does not mean that premises must always have precincts; only that where there are precincts, they too are covered. Some premises have precincts and some do not.
• Therefore open lands, such as the salt works, are "premises" within s. 2(m).
• The conversion of sea water into salt is a "manufacturing process" within s. 2(k)(i). Sea water is a substance; by a controlled sequence of operations it is treated and adapted so as to yield salt with a view to its use, sale, transport, delivery or disposal. That the change is worked by human agency aided by natural forces makes no difference; the workers' labour directs and completes the process.
• The legislature cannot have intended to discriminate between workers engaged in a manufacturing process inside a building and workers engaged in the same process on open land.

Two propositions, both necessary:

1. "Premises" in s. 2(m) is a generic word which includes open land; the words "including the precincts thereof" enlarge rather than restrict it.
2. A process by which sea water is treated and adapted, through human agency aided by natural forces, to produce salt for sale is a "manufacturing process" within s. 2(k)(i), so that the salt works is a factory if the other conditions of s. 2(m) are satisfied.

Underlying both is a proposition of method rather than ratio in the strict sense, but one later courts treat as authoritative: the definitions in the Factories Act are to be construed with reference to the protective purpose of the Act, and, where they will bear it, in the sense that brings workers within its protection.

Note what the case does not decide. It does not dispense with the worker-number requirement in s. 2(m) — that limb was satisfied and unargued. It does not hold that every open-air activity is a manufacturing process; the process must still fall within a clause of s. 2(k). And it says nothing about guilt; it decides only that the Act applied.

The first argument fails on a point of drafting. Statutory definitions use "includes" to add to the natural meaning of a word, only rarely to confine it. Once you accept that "including the precincts thereof" is additive, the appellant's case collapses: he was reading a word of inclusion as a word of limitation. Had Parliament wanted "premises" to mean buildings, it would have said buildings.

The second argument fails on a point about what s. 2(k) is for. It is not a definition of manufacture in the economist's sense — it does not require that a new and different commercial article emerge. It lists operations several of which involve no transformation at all: packing, oiling, washing, cleaning, breaking up, demolishing, and even preserving or storing any article in cold storage. A definition drawn that way plainly reaches beyond ordinary manufacture, and salt-making, which does turn a useless substance into a marketable one, falls comfortably inside it.

The natural forces point is the appellant's best argument. The answer is that natural agency does not displace human agency. The workers choose when to open the sluice, how deep to fill the beds, when to move the brine, when to scrape; sun and wind are, in effect, the plant. What matters is that the operation is organised and directed by people, for a commercial end.

Finally, the anti-discrimination reasoning. The Act exists for the health, safety and welfare of people in industrial employment. A worker standing all day in salt pans under the sun faces real occupational risk, and nothing in the object of the Act suggests Parliament meant to protect him only if a roof happened to be over his head. That is purposive construction at its plainest, and it is the sentence to reproduce in an exam.

Ardeshir became the anchor for a long line of decisions giving s. 2(k) and s. 2(m) a wide reading. Processes held to be manufacturing processes include the treating of sun-cured tobacco leaves by moistening, stripping and packing for despatch to a cigarette factory (V.P. Gopala Rao v Public Prosecutor, Supreme Court, 1970), the peeling and washing of prawns before cold storage, pumping water, garbling pepper and curing ginger, converting latex into sheet rubber, making bidis, and composing type for printing. The theme is the one Ardeshir set: the definition is artificial and expansive, and does not require that a new commercial article emerge.

The same approach settled "ordinarily" in s. 2(m): a seasonal factory — a sugar mill idle in the off-season — does not stop being a factory in the months when nothing is made.

"Premises" was later applied in the same generous way to open and linear sites, including railway-line construction, and the Ardeshir construction was carried into other welfare statutes borrowing the Factories Act concepts, notably the Employees' State Insurance Act 1948.

The method itself — read a welfare definition widely unless the statute plainly requires otherwise — reappears in Bangalore Water Supply v A. Rajappa (1978) on "industry". Cross-refer to it; examiners reward the connection.

The Factories Act 1948 was repealed on 21 November 2025 by the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 (Act 37 of 2020), whose repeal and savings provision is s. 143.

The construction in Ardeshir carries over unchanged, because the Code re-enacts the same words. OSH Code s. 2(w) defines "factory" as "any premises including the precincts thereof" where the stated number of workers work and a manufacturing process is carried on with or without the aid of power. That phrase is identical to the one construed in 1961, and the Code defines "premises" nowhere else — so Ardeshir remains the governing authority on the word.

Manufacturing process is defined in s. 2(zi) in the familiar terms, including treating or adapting any article or substance "with a view to its use, sale, transport, delivery or disposal" — the very clause under which salt-making qualified — along with pumping, generating and transmitting power, printing and book-binding, ship-breaking and cold storage, with power in the Central Government to notify further processes. The second limb of the ratio therefore survives too.

The real change is the threshold. Under s. 2(m) a place was a factory at ten or more workers with power or twenty or more without. Under s. 2(w) the figures are twenty with power and forty without. A salt works of the Ardeshir kind uses no power for the evaporation, so it now needs forty workers before the Code touches it: the doctrine is untouched, the coverage halved. Registration is under s. 3, general duties of the employer under s. 6, and s. 2(w) excludes a mobile unit belonging to the armed forces of the Union.

Under the Code. OSH Code 2020, s. 2(w) re-enacts "factory" as "any premises including the precincts thereof", and s. 2(zi) re-enacts "manufacturing process" including treating or adapting any substance with a view to its use, sale, transport, delivery or disposal. Ardeshir therefore continues to govern the meaning of both phrases. The change is the threshold — 20 workers with power and 40 without, in place of 10 and 20 — which takes many small open-air workplaces out of the Code altogether.