Noida and beyond: India’s workers are being shortchanged. They deserve a fair deal

When workers in Noida took to the streets earlier this week, they did more than just focus attention on the unsustainably low wages that many Indian workers are paid. The spontaneous demonstrations across the Uttar Pradesh city also provided the opportunity for the country’s elite to blare out, yet again, their callous – and counterproductive – opinions about working-class Indians.

The fact that 40,000 workers had blockaded roads and torched vehicles to press their demand for a living wage should not have come as a surprise. Experts had been warning about the frustration building in India’s factories for months.

In December, commentator Anand Teltumbde wrote in Scroll about how the four new labour codes passed by the Bharatiya Janata Party government the previous month “legalised the exploitation of workers, formalised their precarity and celebrated their subordination as liberation”.

On April 1, only two weeks before the protests in Noida, trade unions had called a national strike to demand that these new labour codes be repealed. This action, as Nandita Haksar noted, was being organised when “workers are bearing the brunt of the economic fallout from the US-Israel war on Iran”. As a consequence of the conflict, cooking gas has become scarce and prices of essential commodities have started to creep up.

The immediate...

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