Introduction Frequency rates of severe injury including fatality as well as occupational diseases are notably higher in construction than other industries. Studies also indicate that safety performance of construction industry gets adversely affected due to various factors including inherent nature of high risk activities, deployment of large number of unskilled people, heavy machinery as well as demographic factors.

India, with nearly 1.3 billion population, tremendous ethnic and linguistic diversity, high ratio of younger people, is poised for all-round growth. With focus of development of infrastructure, construction sector is the one which is going to boom and sustain the same for several years.

Construction workers keep moving from one place to the other to pursue their profession. Prior to joining the trade, a miniscule of them receive some formal skill training and safety training which are essential for safe working. Consequently a large portion of them get set to pick-up the trade-skills on-the-job, which compounds the challenges to ensuring a safe working at site.

Methods In this study, spanning over 24 months duration, involving more than 10 000 workers from multiple project sites, factors associated with ‘risk perception’, emerges as one of the most common causative contributors for various recordable injury cases.²

Results The study highlights that, misplaced risk perception by the individuals associated with the activities at various levels, have acted as the ‘trigger’, directly or indirectly, leading the event chain to injury outcome.

Conclusion Subsequently, focused efforts are planned for mitigation, by improving risk awareness among all concerned team members, through various methods, including on-the-job, class-room training and experiential learning associated with activity related hazards and consequences.

This paper describes facets of risk perception, its role in risk mitigation and demonstrate effectiveness of awareness programs as well as other initiatives in optimising risk perception for incident prevention.