The Noida labour violence has received attention of the press and people alike. Here are statements picked up from various articles which will tell us what happened.

The Noida labour unrest has been driven in part by stark pay disparities between states, highlighted by neighbouring Haryana’s recent 35% increase in minimum wages following similar demonstrations.

They earn between 10,000 rupees ($107; £79) and 15,000 rupees a month – wages that have remained largely unchanged for years. Many are migrant workers, living hand-to-mouth in cramped housing on the city’s outskirts.

As protests intensified, the government of Uttar Pradesh – where Noida is located – also announced a temporary wage increase in two districts and promised further measures.

The accused, identified as Aditya Anand, was apprehended from Tiruchirappalli Railway Station in Tamil Nadu. He was carrying a reward of Rs 1 lakh and had been on run since the incident.

Police said Anand first met Mazdoor Bigul a labour-focused organisation led by Anubhav Sinha, on Facebook in 2022 and subsequently began reporting on factory workers’ conditions in the city.

The Labour Department has launched a major crackdown in the industrial areas of Noida following the recent workers’ protest, issuing notices to 43 contractors and cancelling the licences of 10 others for serious violations of labour laws.

The Uttar Pradesh government announced an interim increase in minimum wages for workers in Noida (Gautam Buddha Nagar) and Ghaziabad, effective April 1, 2026. This follows widespread protests, with hikes up to 21% raising monthly wages for unskilled workers to ₹13,690, semi-skilled to ₹15,059, and skilled workers to ₹16,868.

This is a familiar pattern – a protest is followed by police action – there are videos circulating which show police thrashing even women – then comes a palliative of wage increase – it is necessary step by the political leaders. But let us look at the problem, reasons and the context.

The government has made labour laws and policies which are ‘business friendly.’ These policies have effectively given a free hand to the employers to ignore the labour laws.

That an enormous number of workers are not paid the minimum wages is no secret. In Modi’s Gujarat State this is rampant as also in other states. In Surat and other towns, workers work 12 hours a day and what is more, their salaries are decided on the 12 hours ‘boli.’ To put it differently, the employer says I will give you a certain pay for 12 hours work every day.

This ‘pay’ appears to be more than the minimum wage but in fact it is a wage theft. The employer pays 1.5 times the minimum wage per day for 12 hours of work, while he should have paid 2 times. Moreover, workers can’t be asked to work on a 12 hour shift every day!

Surprisingly, the workers are willing to work a 12 hour shift every day! And they are also working on a pay less than the minimum wage – earning something is better than earning nothing!

Here lies the catch – they come to Surat, Silvassa and such other places from Orissa, West Bengal and Andhra because they do not find work there. They come without family – (Surat is called the AIDS Capital of India and you know why!) so working 12 hours a day is not a problem.

We have here many factors combining to create exploitative situation. These are poverty, migration (even in Noida migrant workers started protesting), neglect of implementation of laws by the Labour Departments of various States, and absence of organisations protecting workers’ rights.

These four factors are well known. And there is the fifth factor not recognised so far – the lifestyle expectations of workers have changed. More about it later.

And, oh yes, there are two more – the sixth factor – the greed of small-scale industry employers who do not pay the minimum wages (which are actually starvation wages), and the seventh factor is the deep-rooted corruption in the Government’s Labour Department.

We know enough about poverty and migration. I will not elaborate them. The Government has practically done away with ‘inspection’ under the name of destroying ‘inspection raj.’ This has given unscrupulous employers a blank cheque. I have written about the Pirangut case (Read about it here) where the factory was not registered for eight years but was running before an accident claimed seventeen lives, almost all of them were women.

Just in case the reader is about to dismiss this as a solitary case of its type, there was another fire incident in Chinchwad where a few lives were lost and that factory was also not registered.

How is this possible? No marks for guessing. Corrupt Government officials. After Pirangut incident, the protesters carried placards showing how much one had to pay for various permissions and licenses from the Government authorities!

Let me now talk about the key factor ‘absence of organisations protecting workers’ rights.’

And I will cite two incidents. First, when Racold factory suddenly shut the gates retrenching all workers on the eve of Diwali in 2018, nobody took up their case. Their union was affiliated to a communist party union, but even it did not raise voice effectively. Surprisingly even the MP and MLA were quiet, why? They were people representatives, but they chose silence!

Second, in the General Motors case permission for closure was granted by the Government but the way this matter was managed raises many questions. The number of workers who lost their jobs are reported to be 1086 permanent and 2000 contract workers. This would not have been possible if the labour unions were strong and united.

Now this factor which is going unnoticed – the lifestyle expectations of workers have changed.

I recently interviewed two workers from a Pune based Tata Group company. It was paying more than the minimum wages to the workers I interviewed. Each worker had two children, and they had enrolled them in the English Medium schools. These schools charge an annual fee exceeding Rs 60 thousand! The workers were finding it exceedingly difficult to make two ends meet. But they wanted their children to progress, and the path was through English medium schools!

The workers have the dice loaded against them. And that statement is also not going to inform the readers about the terrible situation at the bottom of the pyramid. This stratum is neglected by the Government, by the Labour Unions, and by the corporate honchos.

This scenario must change. If it is not changed proactively, it will get changed reactively.

Do you get what I mean?

Vivek S Patwardhan

“What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.” All matter copyrighted.