Guest post by ANUMEHA YADAV

NOIDA, Uttar Pradesh: At 8 am, an hour before factories would start work. Maina Devi* waited for her company bus on the sidewalk next to a large warehouse in Phase 2 of Noida’s industrial area.

It had been a week since she and hundreds of workers from multiple factories on the borders of Delhi stopped work for four days protesting low wages and difficult work conditions. Several factories still had visible damages. Amid the continued police presence, fresh notices on factory gates reassuring workers of revised wages, Devi was heading to work, her thumb in a fresh bandage.

Employed at Gurudas Amardas International Private Limited, that makes wire harness for automobiles and shielded cables used in automation and data communication, the migrant worker from Muradabad in Uttar Pradesh, 160 km away from her factory, had punctured her left thumb the previous day while putting a wire on the terminal.

Despite the injury being extremely painful, Devi told The Migration Story that she had no choice but to go to work as she was supporting her three children and missing a day’s work would mean losing 530 rupees.

The company had hired her on a monthly wage of 11,313 rupees, which after the strikes is set to rise to 13,690 rupees. Earlier, she had worked for two years in garment factories across the road in the NOIDA hosiery complex. “They paid even lower, only 9,000 rupees a month,” Devi said. “For two years, I stood daily at the table cutting threads in 12 hour-long shifts and the company did not increase our wages by even one rupee.”

From 2024 to 2026, she had worked three to four hours overtime nearly daily, she added. For this, the company had paid her 25 rupees for every additional hour of work after the regular eight-hour shift. This was in breach of the law that requires an employer to pay at least twice the normal wage as overtime for each extra hour. But most employers do not pay this rate, she said.

“You must stand from 8 or 9 am to 9 pm everyday. At the most, you go to the toilet as a break. But one must rush back from the toilet to the station. Otherwise, production targets, handling 40 to 50 pieces an hour, pile up and become impossible,” she recalled.

As per the Minimum Wages Act, state governments are mandated to revise the minimum wages at least every five years. But both Uttar Pradesh and Haryana governments, where workers in the industrial areas around the national capital went on large strikes earlier this month, had not revised the minimum wages in over 10 years.

These years of quietly working in low-paying jobs were disrupted when Devi and her co-workers joined hundreds of other workers in the industrial complex 30 km from Delhi to protest against poor wages, long working hours, and extremely low overtime pay. Videos posted by the firm’s young workers record their colleagues in large numbers picketing the factory gate, peacefully, while policemen in riot gear approached them carrying batons.

The protests resulted in the Uttar Pradesh government revising the base or minimum wage rate, the wages of most workers such as Devi were set to rise from 11,313 rupees, now after the strikes, to 13,690 rupees.

“Ho gaya sahi. Clear ho gaya sab (It got corrected. It was sorted),” said younger women workers who had gathered around Devi.

A Decade of Stagnant Wages 

In Noida Phase-II, the protests began on April 9 and from there it spread across industrial belts in more than eight sites in NCR. As per labour activists’ estimates, the protests involved around 50,000 factory workers in Noida alone. It further spread even among domestic workers and gig workers.

Uttar Pradesh, where Noida is located, had not increased minimum wages since 2012. The law requires that minimum wage be revised at least every five years.

Yogesh Kumar, an activist with Inqilabi Mazdoor Kendra, a non-registered organisation which aims to act as a labour collective for registered unions, recounted that the recent series of protests in NOIDA had followed a series of similar wage hike demands by workers of Honda automobile manufacturing plant in Haryana’s Manesar on April 2, 70 km from Noida.

“From Honda, it spread to Munjal Showa Limited plant on April 4, which is behind Honda, then to Satyam Auto, Roop Polymers by April 6, and from there to garment companies such as Richa Global and Modelama by April 8,” said Kumar. “Workers came out of Richa Global’s three of six factories in Manesar. After they won a wage hike on April 9, workers of Richa Global factories in Noida – the same firm runs five factories in Noida – and workers of Mothersons Sumi Wiring (an automobiles sector firm) started asking for their similar wage increase. This intensified April 13 onwards.”

Haryana announced a revision on April 9, 2026, after workers did a series of strikes and protests that spread from factory to factory in automobile, ancillary, and garment exports units in Industrial Model Town Manesar near Gurugram.

The Haryana wage revision was after nearly 11 years.

Even these revisions may not adequately address rising costs. For instance, accounting for price rise, as per the All India Consumer Price Index Numbers (for Industrial Workers), if a worker earned 10,000 rupees minimum wages per month in 2015, then to keep pace with inflation, the worker would need to earn 15,466 rupees per month in 2026.

But most Indian workers, despite contributing to the so-called formal or organised sector, earn rock-bottom wages. An analysis in the Azim Premji University’s State of Working India Report shows that even in 2015, 92% women and 82% men earned less than 10,000 rupees a month.

The Uttar Pradesh minimum wage for unskilled work in 2015, was just 9,078 rupees. Thus, the base minimum wages on which revisions occur are already very low. This is half of what the Seventh Central Pay Commission had recommended 10 years ago  as a living wage.

Following large scale protests that went on for over three days, and impacted vehicle movement on National Highway 9, Uttar Pradesh finally increased the minimum wages, to 13,690 for “unskilled” category, that includes workers employed as helpers and thread-cutters.

Women workers who gathered spoke of minor relief after the mass strikes last week: “They have increased our overtime pay from 30 rupees to 40 rupees an hour,” said Diksha, a young woman worker in a refrigeration factory.

Most were hopeful that some improvement may follow by next month. “I worked for 10,000 rupees last year. Now, they are saying the company will pay us 13,000 rupees, let us see,” said Kakoli, a worker from Kolkata, who works in Richa Global, one of Delhi-NCR’s biggest garment export factories with an annual turnover of over 2,000 crore rupees, which works with global brands such as Zara and Marks and Spencer.

The Centre of Indian Trade Unions(CITU), a national union affiliated with the Communist Party of India(Marxist) issued a statement on April 14 critiquing the government’s actions as too little, too late.

“The so-called wage increase is a sham – far below survival levels,” it noted. “Workers in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana are paid significantly less than in Delhi despite identical living costs. In the face of soaring inflation, the demand for a minimum wage of ₹26,000 per month is not merely a demand but a necessity.”

On April 17, Elamaram Kareem who is general secretary of CITU, questioned the Uttar Pradesh police for arresting labour activists who had gone to meet the district magistrate of Gautam Buddha Nagar where Noida is located. NOIDA police have arrested over 300 persons, including activists. “It is a shocking repression,” he stated.  “CITU Delhi State General Secretary Aniyan P.V., President Virender Gaur, were illegally detained by the police on April 17. Earlier, in the early hours of 16 April our district secretary, Ram Swarath, was similarly illegally detained.”

Diksha Singh, Assistant Commissioner of Police of Gautam Buddha Nagar, refused to comment on the arrests to The Migration Story. “All I can say is that the protests began at the hosiery complex and spread to other areas.” Diksha Singh said that the protests were instigated by a handful of labour activists on WhatsApp.

‘We Cleared Our Own Path’

On April 17, a large number of police and industrial area security continued to monitor road junctions. Several factories’ glass facades remained broken in several places from stone pelting. Almost every factory gate now displayed prominent notices about wage increase in each grade of skills and for different categories of workers.

Sukhvarsha Projects Private limited, a garment unit employs over 100 workers and runs 24 hours in three shifts, starting at 6 am. Its workers said the intensity of the protests and the repression that followed may have come as a surprise to other city residents, but that the conditions were building up for weeks.

“Why did the Uttar Pradesh government not increase the wage rate before the bawaal (chaos) ensued?” said Sushil Verma, a worker supervisor at the factory from Agra. “Why did the government take so many days after the Haryana government’s wage announcement? It is after the workers gathered, after the tod-phod (damage to factories) that the government took any initiative at all on our wages.”

Outside Noida Electronics Company Limited, a worker from Agra who works as a driver, waited for the employers at the factory gate. “Even movement on a road slows down when there are potholes in the path,” he said, referring to structural reasons behind the protests. “For some time now, there have been problems and wage theft has been going on. Workers slowed down work, thousands came out and finally agitated only to ask to correct this theft. This had to happen.”

 * Workers’ names have been changed on request

 Anumeha Yadav is a freelance journalist. Her reportage focuses on the rights and social security of lower income workers, primarily migrants to India’s metropolises

This article was first published by the Migration Story, India’s first newsroom to focus on the country’s vast internal migrant population