In April, a wave of strikes swept through the National Capital Region around Delhi. They began in the town of Manesar in Haryana state, spread to Noida, a city in Uttar Pradesh about 100km away, and soon had widened to cities further afield: Bhiwadi, Faridabad, Neemrana, Rudrapur and beyond. Within a month, ground reports counted walkouts at over 150 sites across five states. The NCR is one of the most densely industrialized areas in the world, a constellation of planned manufacturing hubs, expanding rapidly after the economic liberalization of the 1990s. The region now stretches from Delhi, at its core, across several adjoining states – Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, all BJP-ruled – employing several million workers in producing automobiles, electronics, garments and consumer goods.
Discontent has been accumulating for years. Pay is suppressed by interstate competition to attract manufacturing investment, while the minimum wage has been frozen since 2016. Inflation has severely eroded purchasing power. Yet unionizing is nearly impossible, thanks to the contract labour system and the fragmentation of supply chains. Resistance to such conditions has until recently therefore been mostly individual and informal: work slowdowns; calling in sick; refusing overtime. At the extreme, workers get on a bus back to their village and don’t come back; the turnover rate in NCR factories is so high that management treat it as a cost of doing business.
Take Manesar, where the strikes began. The Gurgaon-Manesar industrial belt, south-west of New Delhi, grew up around the carmaker Maruti Suzuki, established in the early 1980s as a joint venture between the Indian government and the Japanese firm. The government’s phased manufacturing programme transformed this area into one of India’s principal automobile production clusters. Manesar’s Industrial Model Township alone encompasses 2,200 manufacturing units employing roughly 300,000 workers as of 2023. The average contract worker at an auto-component plant works twelve-hour shifts and earns ₹600 (roughly $6) a day; with no written contract or formal grievance mechanism, their employment is subject to 30-day renewals, which their employer can choose not to honour. Overtime pay is rarely calculated correctly; deductions for ‘breakage’ are common and arbitrary. A survey by the Migrant Workers Solidarity Network found that more than 60 per cent of workers in the Manesar belt have never received a payslip.
In Noida, a hub southeast of New Delhi specializing in garments and electronics, production is dispersed across thousands of factories linked through contractors and subcontractors. Workers face daily wage theft through illegal deductions and arbitrary termination. Apprentice status, legally capped at two years, has been used systematically to deny workers the benefits owed to permanent employees and wages commensurate with their skills. Workers endure exploitative and illegal conditions because the risk of dismissal is one most cannot afford to take. A contract worker with no savings or social security, and a family dependent on monthly remittances back to their village, cannot absorb a loss of income. And across the NCR, termination of employment has been the standard response to any resistance. Being blacklisted in a district where all the factories share contractors and supervisors would mean being unable to find work.
Another factor that has inhibited collective action is the varying circumstances among workers. A permanent worker has different priorities to a 30-day contractor who can be sacked without notice. The grievances of an apprentice differ from those of a piece-rate worker whose monthly income can fluctuate unpredictably. Yet the institutional avenues required to overcome such differences were further narrowed by the new Labour Codes implemented in November 2025. The reforms consolidated the existing trajectory of labour-market liberalization, making mass layoffs easier by cutting red tape, making union recognition contingent on securing 51 per cent membership, a virtually unattainable threshold, and introducing procedural requirements that make legal strikes considerably harder to organize.
In the first three months of this year, however, there were signs that mass resistance was nonetheless growing; there were at least 28 documented major industrial actions. This included a walkout at Indian Oil’s Panipat refinery in Haryana: 30,000 workers halted production for six days, with security forces firing to disperse the crowds. There were also actions at ArcelorMittal Nippon Steel in Surat, at Adani Power in Singrauli, and at UltraTech Cement plants across four states. These were not coordinated but rather parallel reactions to the same structural pressures.
Why did these longstanding grievances suddenly flare into industrial action? The new Labour Codes formed part of the political backdrop, not least because of the disappointment they represented: many workers had expected improvements in wages or employment security; the Codes were heavily publicized, with government hoardings across the corridor presenting them as major reforms. Two further factors coalesced in April, which together decisively altered workers’ calculations. The first was the cost of living. India imports most of its crude oil, and the outbreak of the West Asia conflict sent fuel and cooking gas prices soaring, devouring what little remained of workers’ wages after rent. For workers taking home roughly ₹10,000 a month – around $3.80 a day after deductions – the price of a cooking gas cylinder became a survival issue. The second was the immediate trigger: on 9 April, the Haryana state government, under pressure from weeks of sustained industrial unrest in Manesar, announced a 35 per cent minimum wage hike for unskilled workers, from ₹11,274 ($119) to ₹15,220 ($161) per month. For workers in Noida, being paid less for identical work for the same multinational companies, the announcement sparked indignation and hope that they could force the Uttar Pradesh administration to give way too.
The supply chain became the circuit along which news of the strikes travelled. When Richa Global garment workers in Manesar struck and were attacked by police, Richa Global workers in Noida walked out in response. Workers at Motherson, one of India’s largest auto-component manufacturers, saw strikes travel from Noida to Faridabad, Lucknow, Haldwani and Bhiwadi, moving down the production line. By 14 April, more than 42,000 workers were on the streets across 83 locations. The mobilization spread horizontally, through factory gate conversations, migration networks and the caste and regional solidarities binding workers to their home villages. Social media was also key. Migrant workers from Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh built a parallel culture of solidarity on Instagram, where they could watch footage of the Indian Oil workers in Panipat pelting paramilitary forces with stones. The spread of such images helped to make the working class legible to itself across geography and sector.
The state’s response followed brutal precedent. In 2011–12, workers at Manesar’s Maruti Suzuki plant campaigned for the right to form an independent union. After a violent confrontation in July 2012, 546 permanent and 1,800 contract workers were dismissed without inquiry. Over 147 were jailed. Thirteen strike leaders received life sentences based on what a report issued by the People’s Union for Democratic Rights deemed fabricated evidence. The repression and criminalization of the strikes contributed to the weakening of the organizational infrastructure of the region.
This year, the state and police similarly sought to criminalize the strikers. It claimed the industrial actions were manufactured by outside agitators and termed them WhatsApp conspiracies; when those claims didn’t stick, they alleged links to Pakistan, Naxalism – anything that displaced the issue at hand: working conditions and pay. In Manesar, there were mass arrests of hundreds of workers alongside the targeting of organizers and activists. Members of the labour organization Inquilabi Mazdoor Kendra were detained along with factory workers at the auto-part manufacturer Bellsonica; all were branded conspirators and jailed. In Noida, thousands of workers were detained. Supporters of the strikes were also targeted, including a software engineer who posted a video urging workers to protest peacefully, and a veteran journalist who had not set foot in the city in twelve years. Then came the invocation of the National Security Act, which enables ‘preventive’ detention without charge or trial. Hundreds of workers remain in jail on charges of attempted murder. Custodial torture has been documented.
By June production had resumed across the region, though many who fled following the arrests have been unable to return to work. The movement nevertheless secured an important immediate concession: within days of the mobilization, both Haryana and Uttar Pradesh revised the minimum wage. Yet the gains proved uneven. Many employers have yet to implement the revised rates, quiet retaliation through the non-renewal of contracts has continued, and hundreds of workers remain in jail while criminal proceedings against organizers and activists are ongoing.
Though the strikes may not have transformed the labour regime that produced them, they brought into sharp relief a key contradiction of India’s economic model. Over the past decade, the Modi government has made manufacturing a central part of its growth strategy, with the factories, logistics networks and vast supply chains of the Delhi–NCR industrial corridor a jewel in the crown, promoted as evidence of India’s emergence as a global manufacturing power. This industrial drive has depended on a ‘flexible’ labour regime marked by deep insecurity, stagnant wages and growing frustration among workers, which anti-labour laws cannot indefinitely suppress, as the spring strikes vividly demonstrated. Whether they prove a turning point depends on the organizational infrastructure built in their wake.
Read on: Pranab Bardhan, ‘The “New” India’, NLR 136.