Ram Kishan left for work before his family woke up. It was November 3, 2017, and the Moser Baer plant in Greater Noida had been dark for two days – management had called it maintenance, told workers to come back on the third day. So Kishan showed up at the gate at 6:15 in the morning.

The gates didn’t open.

He was 28, a technician who had been with the company since 2002. He had a wife, three children – the oldest just six – and a rented home in Faridabad held together by this one factory job. His colleague Padmakar Rajput remembers him standing outside the shuttered gate, asking aloud how he was going to feed his family. By the end of that day, the plant’s 4,000 workers had been told the plant was shut indefinitely. Two days later, Ram Kishan suffered a brain haemorrhage. He did not survive.

The factory never reopened. The case his colleagues filed – over enhancement of wages in compensation, provident fund, gratuity, retrenchment compensation – has since passed through the District Labour Commissioner, into the National Company Law Tribunal, into liquidation, and back into procedural limbo. Eight years on, the workers say, their dues remain unpaid. It is one of more than 1.14 lakh disputes pending across the country.

What brought all of this back into focus arrived last month, when Noida’s industrial belt, often projected as the economic engine of Uttar Pradesh, erupted.

From April 10, 2026, labourers from across the satellite city, home to more than 10,000 industrial units, flooded the streets seeking higher wages, fixed working hours, and payment for overtime. Their demand was simple: that employers comply with labour laws and guidelines laid down by the central government. Most were also demanding a monthly wage of at least Rs 20,000. By April 13, the protests had turned violent.

Several media houses have, in the past, held Gautam Buddha Nagar – comprising Noida and Greater Noida – as UP’s success story, comparing it to Japan in terms of purchasing power parity. The workers’ unrest tore through this image of prosperity, exposing the systemic exploitation that runs deep into the industrial economy of Delhi NCR.

The state’s response was telling. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath called the protests an attempt to “revive Naxalism” by “misleading and disruptive elements”. Labour Minister Anil Rajbhar described the agitation as a “well-planned conspiracy” and said agencies were probing a “Pakistan connection”. Gautam Buddha Nagar Police Commissioner Laxmi Singh called the violence a “mala fide, internationally organised activity”. Eventually, Adityanath assured that the government was committed to protecting workers’ interests, and BJP MLA Narendra Kashyap urged protesters to bring their demands to the government instead of the streets.

The protesters, however, argued that the government and the formal labour grievance redressal system had long been part of the problem. The distress, activists said, had been simmering for years. The Noida protests were merely the latest flare in a........

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