By Inderjit Badhwar
The story you are about to read—our cover report on India’s new labour codes—arrives at a moment of quiet, but decisive change. Every few years, a policy reform appears that does not simply alter rules, but shifts the very grammar of the nation’s economic and social life. The new labour codes belong to that category. They are not cosmetic adjustments. They are tectonic.
For decades, India’s labour architecture has been criticised from all quarters—by industry for being rigid, by workers for being poorly enforced, and by economists for being too complex to guide a country that is now the world’s fifth-largest economy. With 29 laws now collapsed into four streamlined codes, the government argues that India is finally catching up with the demands of a modern labour market. The question we must ask is: Modern for whom?
This is where Vickram Kilpady’s story stands apart. Rather than accepting the easy binaries—pro-worker versus pro-industry, reformer versus obstructionist—he studies the lived realities these codes will soon define. If implemented in their intended spirit, the reforms can push employers towards formalisation, compel companies to treat gig and platform workers with greater responsibility, and widen the social security net to millions who currently live outside it. But the same provisions, in the absence of vigilance, also contain the possibility of new inequities, new ambiguities, and new blind spots.
A major strength of the reportage lies in examining the distance between law and practice. In India, regulation has always lived a dual life—one on paper, one in the field. The codes promise universal social security and portable benefits, but will states have the administrative capacity to build and maintain such a system? Inspectors have been renamed “facilitators,” but will this semantic shift ensure transparency or merely soften accountability? Collective bargaining and unionisation remain constitutional rights, but how will they operate when compliance becomes digital and the workforce becomes increasingly fragmented?
The stakes are high. More Indians today rely on precarious, unstandardised, or app-based work than at any point in our industrial history. The codes gesture towards this reality, but do not always meet it fully. Gig workers, for instance, are acknowledged for the first time—but without any compulsory contribution by employers, even as profits continue to depend on those very workers. The result is a halfway recognition: symbolic yet insufficient.
Still, it would be inaccurate—and unfair—to dismiss the codes as merely half-formed. What they undeniably represent is a long-overdue attempt to bring coherence to chaos. Generations of Indian workers have lived in a grey zone of informal employment that offered neither protection nor progression. If these reforms push the system towards greater documentation, predictability, and transparency, that in itself is a step forward.
The challenge now shifts from policy design to political will. Implementation will require not just new rules, but new sensibilities: governments that recognise enforcement as a duty, companies that see compliance not as a burden, but as the cost of legitimacy, and citizens who demand fairness not as charity but as right.
Labour reform was never going to be simple. India’s workforce is too diverse, its industries too uneven, its states too asymmetrical for any single model to work neatly. But the attempt to modernise—if done with care—could set the stage for a more resilient economy, one where workers are not invisible and employers are not trapped in outdated compliance labyrinths.
That is why this story matters. It traces not only what the codes say, but what they could mean. It listens to concerns without sensationalism and examines reforms without ideological fog. It is exactly the kind of journalism that reminds us why labour—often ignored, often undervalued—is the true engine of the Indian story.
As you turn the page, I hope you read this piece not only as a report on new laws, but as an invitation to imagine what a fairer, more inclusive future of work in India might look like. The conversation these codes ignite will shape our next decade. It deserves our clearest thinking, our closest scrutiny, and our deepest moral attention.
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