In ‘new UP’, the real message behind setting up a Noida police cell for industrial disputes

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanath in a column in the Indian Express on April 28 headlined “Story of new UP” spoke of restoring “dignity, belonging, and hope” to the state.

No child of Uttar Pradesh “should ever feel compelled to leave home in search of dignity and opportunity”, Adityanath wrote. “...Migration must be a choice, not a compulsion.” The Uttar Pradesh chief minister claimed that his administration was guided by the Jan Vishwas Siddhant policy – a “trust-based governance framework [that] replaces suspicion with partnership”.

A report published in the newspaper on the same day says that following the protest by factory workers in Noida for five days from April 9, the Gautam Buddh Nagar police have created a new post of Deputy Commissioner of Police (Industries). This officer will be supported by an Assistant Commissioner of Police, three inspectors and 25 other personnel.

Adityanath’s column and the police announcement together constitute the real policy statement of the New Uttar Pradesh. They must be read as a single document.

The chief minister writes that the youth of Uttar Pradesh were once forced to leave their janmabhoomi, or birthplaces, by “compulsion, not aspiration”. But many of the workers who protested in Noida are likely those who remained or returned – those who staked their futures on industrial employment in their home state, and migrants who came seeking it.

Contract workers in Noida’s factories are paid Rs 10,000-Rs-12,000 a month, forced into workdays of 10 to 13 hours, denied overtime pay or benefits under the Employees State Insurance Corporation, and provident fund contributions.

Roshan Kishore and Abhishek Jha in the Hindustan Times analysed the government’s Periodic Labour Force Survey data and found that the monthly salary of Rs 22,500 – what Noida workers are demanding as a minimum – places a manufacturing worker only in the top 20% of their salaried peers in the sector. The median manufacturing worker earns around Rs 15,000, the bottom decile Rs 7,000.

The average salaried manufacturing worker earns Rs 18,735, which is lower than the all-industry average of Rs 22,699. This gap widens with age: manufacturing workers above 40 earn almost 20% less than the average salaried person their age.

Manufacturing becomes less rewarding the longer you do it. Is this the reality behind Adityanath’s promise of “high-wage employment and new possibilities for our youth”?

Until the Noida agitation, Uttar Pradesh had not revised its minimum wages since 2014. The 21% hike, announced under pressure, brought the minimum prescribed earnings for unskilled workers in Noida to Rs 13,690 per month – barely half the living wage benchmark for Delhi-National Capital Region and well below the Rs 26,000 the workers demanded.

The new wage was rejected because workers doubted it would be implemented. They remember the demonetisation period when some contractors paid official wages through banks and then took back several thousand rupees in cash as a condition for continued employment.

The Indian Industrial Association has already expressed dismay at even this interim hike. When a state government cannot enforce its own minimum wage, announcing a new one carries no credibility.

The workers’ protest in Noida is hardly a sudden explosion of anger and neither is it a conspiracy pushed by foreign social media accounts – though the state’s invocation of Pakistani handles to delegitimise the protests is itself revealing. It came from the dismantling of institutions whose purpose is to prevent such an outburst.

First is the failure of ensuring minimum wages. Both Haryana and Uttar Pradesh failed to constitute their minimum wage advisory committees for over a decade, allowing real wages to be eroded by inflation while industries paid suppressed wages with impunity.

In Haryana’s Manesar, protests began on April 2 with contract workers from Honda Motorcycle & Scooter India Ltd, and quickly spread across contract workers of other companies in the industrial township. The agitation drew in thousands demanding implementation of the revised minimum wages.

Even after the Haryana government on April 8 announced a new minimum wage, garment workers continued to protest, simply asking that the signed notification of the revised rates be posted on company notice boards – the most basic act of enforcement.

On April 9, the district administration invoked prohibitory orders. The next day, the Gurugram Police arrested 55 workers and filed two FIRs.

But in both states the denial of freedom of association – the refusal to register unions, trade unions not being recognised, every meaningful grievance channel being blocked – left workers with no legitimate outlet to express or escalate their distress.

Over 90% of India’s workers are outside the purview of trade unions. Where experienced union leadership exists, it channels anger into negotiation and converts spontaneous outrage into collective bargaining.

Where such organising has been suppressed, workers eventually act without it, as seen repeatedly in the last few years. The disorder that follows is then used to justify the previous repressive tactics.

In Noida, the district administration and factory managements ignored the protests until desperate workers blocked major roads on April 13. Traffic jams forced media coverage, which then pushed the state government to respond. The state was aware of the workers’ distress but chose to ignore them until that was no longer possible.

This has happened before. After the 2012 violence at the Maruti car plant in Harynana’s Manesar, the police randomly arrested workers and anyone who came forward to lead them, using the loophole of FIRs that also listed “unknown others” as being among the suspects.

Haryana’s chief minister at the time, BS Hooda, said no new unions would be allowed to register. The institution of industrial relations – conciliation, collective bargaining, the Labour Commissionerate – was bypassed in favour of a permanent police presence: a battalion of 600 policemen was stationed in the Manesar industrial area as a security response to a labour dispute.

Fourteen years later, the Noida Deputy Commissioner of Police (Industries) is Uttar Pradesh’s version of Haryana’s template. But the repression in Noida went further.

Several leaders of the Centre for Industrial Trade Unions, like Mukesh Raghav and Ram Sarawat, were placed under house arrest during the protests. By April 16, two days after the protests subsided, the Uttar Pradesh police carried out mass detentions of at least 1,000 - 1,2000 workers. The police even tried to prevent lawyers from providing legal assistance.

In Manesar, between April 9 and April 12, at least 60 workers and local activists were arrested under serious charges, including arson and attempt to murder.

Adityanath’s column in the Indian Express is candid about the underlying philosophy of a new Uttar Pradesh. The “Udyog Vishwas” initiative to improve Uttar Pradesh’s industrial environment, he writes, rests on “decriminalisation, deregulation and digitisation” – replacing “complex, punitive regulations” so that “honest enterprises can operate without fear”.

The problem, however, is the asymmetry.

The Labour Codes of 2020, which came into force in November, clearly show what decriminalisation means in practice. The four labour codes mark a decisive shift toward the decriminalisation of employer non-compliance while expanding the criminalisation of workers’ collective action.

On the employer’s side, violations that earlier attracted criminal prosecution – failing to pay wages, provident fund violations – are now compoundable offences, settled through fines. The inspectorate has been replaced by an Inspector-cum-Facilitator, retreating from enforcement toward self-compliance.

The threshold for prior government approval for layoffs, retrenchment and closure of units has been raised from 100 to 300 workers, removing a large segment of establishments from regulatory oversight entirely.

On the worker’s side, the requirement of prior notice before striking – earlier limited to public utility services – has now been extended to all establishments, rendering spontaneous or protest strikes illegal and exposing workers to penal consequences.

Thresholds for standing orders – which are mandated workplace rules that set out conditions of employment and protect workers from arbitrary changes by employers – and retrenchment protections have been raised, stripping workers in smaller establishments of statutory protections. Fixed-term employment has been formally recognised, facilitating casualisation without safeguards.

The share of contract workers in organised industry has risen from 15.5% in 1998-’99 to 42% in 2023-’24. Of them, only 16.5% of manufacturing workers have a written contract and only 20.4% have any social security.

Employer violations are treated as regulatory lapses to be regularised. Workers’ exercise of collective rights is subjected to heightened procedural constraints backed by penal consequences. What is being decriminalised is the suppression of labour standards. What is being criminalised is the assertion of them.

India has institutions that are supposed to deal with industrial disputes: the Labour Commissioner, the industrial conciliation machinery, the minimum wage advisory committee. But these are underfunded, understaffed, and in the case of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, they have not been constituted for over a decade.

Uttar Pradesh’s DCP (Industries) is a signal that collective action is a law-and-order problem, instead of a matter of industrial relations. The message to workers is to accept whatever wages are dictated by the market, in its current unreformed state.

Adityanath writes that his government “neither fears the mafia nor bows to vested interests”. Workers in Noida can test that claim easily: recognise their unions, enforce the minimum wage Adityanath’s own government sets, reconstitute the minimum wage advisory committee, let the Labour Commissioner – not the police – adjudicate their demands.

If the answer is another police cell, it is clear whose interests the New Uttar Pradesh serves and whose dignity remains a promise perpetually deferred.

Rakhi Sehgal is an independent labour researcher with over two decades of association with the trade union movement.

Source: Scroll
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