Kanpur’s industrial decline unfolded gradually, as textile mills closed, secure employment contracted and workers moved into precarious forms of labour. Labour history, policy shifts, and workers’ experiences reveal how deindustrialisation weakened collective identities and removed labour from the city’s development priorities, public memory, and imagined future, despite workers’ enduring contribution to Kanpur’s industrial and social life across the 20th century.

Kanpur was once a major centre of industrial production in North India, which was known for its cotton, jute, leather, and engineering units. For decades, factory-based employment structured the city’s economy and social life, particularly during the mid-20th century, sustaining a large working-class population through relatively stable livelihoods. Mills such as Elgin, Lal Imli, and Swadeshi Cotton functioned as production centres as well as key social institutions, around which neighbourhoods across the city, from Dadanagar to Jajmau, developed over time in close relation to industrial workplaces.

Today, many of these factories lie silent. Kanpur’s industrial decline unfolded gradually, amid recurring worker protests and mobilisations, but without one singular episode that came to define the city’s public memory. The trajectory of industrial decline in Kanpur cannot be explained adequately through an economic lens, since it has been shaped over time by political choices and moral assumptions embedded in a development discourse that celebrates inclusive growth while remaining silent on redistribution, job quality, and precarious livelihoods (Sood 2016: 57).

Building Industrial Kanpur

Kanpur emerged as an important industrial centre under British colonial rule. Connected to East India Company trade from the late 18th century, it developed into a major centre of textile and leather production during the 19th century. Industrial expansion accelerated during the two world wars, when factories in Kanpur received large military orders. The scale of organised industrial labour was already substantial by the mid-1950s. A contemporary report on the Kanpur textile strike records that 11 textile and two jute mills, involving approximately 51,000 workers, participated in the general strike of May–July 1955. The dispute centred on rationalisation, increased workloads, gra­tu­ity, standing orders, suspension allowances, wages and bonus (AITUC 1955: 18). 

The expansion of industrial employment reshaped the city’s social and political life. The mill hooters marked the rhythms of everyday life, while factory gates became important sites of collective mobilisation. These spaces also became arenas in which workers and their families negotiated the consequences of industrial restructuring, as later seen in the campaign around New Victoria Mills (Ali 2021). This industrial world was neither harmonious nor created entirely by factory management. Workers confronted arbitrary discipline, unequal authority, and harsh conditions, but they also negotiated workplace rules, asserted their own understandings of time and dignity, and used everyday practices and collective action to contest managerial control. These struggles helped form a work culture that extended beyond the factory into neighbourhood and associational life (Joshi 2002: 155–72).

From the late 1960s onwards, the government took over several financially distressed textile mills. The campaign led by Ram Asrey and the Suti Mill Mazdoor Sabha for the reopening and nationalisation of New Victoria Mills was particularly significant. Beginning in 1970, the campaign mobilised unemployed workers and their families through gate meetings, demonstrations, and a Jail Bharo Andolan. The campaign eventually succeeded in securing government intervention and the nationalisation of the mill (Ali 2021). The successful campaign for New Victoria Mills formed part of a wider period of state intervention in Kanpur’s financially distressed textile industry, which also brought the British India Corporation (BIC) under the Union gov­ernment ownership in 1981 (Government of India 1981).

By the late 1960s, contemporary government assessments were already identifying technological obsolescence and the need for modernisation and rationalisation in the cotton textile industry. The National Commission on Labour’s Study Group for Cotton Textiles noted in 1968 that much of the industry’s plant and machinery was old and outmoded and treated modernisation, rehabilitation, and rationalisation as continuing policy concerns (Sreenivasan 1968). By the 1990s, these problems interacted with the expansion of decentralised production and power loom competition. These developments did not indicate the disappearance of the state from industrial policy. Rather, state intervention changed direction, providing increasingly uneven and limited protection to industrial workers. As Sood (2016: 58–59) argues more broadly, economic reforms in India did not produce a non-interventionist state; they altered the purposes and beneficiaries of state intervention.

Liberalisation and Industrial Labour

The economic reforms initiated in 1991 created a new policy environment for Kanpur’s already declining textile industry. The crisis, however, predated liberalisation. Contemporary labour-policy documents had already identified techno­lo­gical obsolescence, modernisation and rationalisation as major problems within the textile industry (Sreenivasan 1968). After 1991, these older problems were refracted through a new policy environment in which competitiveness, restructuring and industrial viability assumed greater importance. For Kanpur’s state-owned mills, state intervention there­fore did not simply disappear; rather, it increasingly operated through mech­anisms of industrial sickness, rehabilitation, workforce reduction and decisions about closure (Sood 2016: 58–59). Intervention increasingly took the form of industrial-sickness proceedings, work­force reduction, contested revival schemes, and decisions about closure. Workers dealt with the state through labour departments, arbitration, tribunals, and courts, as well as through the mills that employed them. 

Industrial conflict was already visible at Elgin Mills before liberalisation. In 1980, a dispute over the bonus payable for the previous year led workers at Elgin Mills No 2 to strike from 16 July to 2 September, after which the management declared a lockout and dismissed 81 workers. Intervention by the Uttar Pradesh Labour Minister led to voluntary arbitration, the lifting of the lockout and withdrawal of action against 61 workers. Litigation concerning the remaining dismissals continued through the 1980s. The Allahabad High Court subsequently upheld Labour Court awards directing the reinstatement of 11 workers with continuity of service and partial back wages. The judgment found that meetings and forceful advocacy of the bonus demand did not by themselves........

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