Labour, Legality And Illusion Of Equality

“We're prisoners of war,” Chacko said. “Our dreams have been doctored. We belong nowhere. We sail unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed ashore. Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter.”

— Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

When daily wage workers in Noida poured into the streets in the second week of April 2026, torching vehicles, blocking NH-9, drawing tear gas and nearly three hundred arrests, the country received for a few news cycles a glimpse of what the Indian growth story rests on. The coverage was thin. What little there was framed them as disturbers of the social order, not as men whom the order had quietly succeeded in keeping exploitable. Their demand was not, in any honest reading of Article 14, a claim to fair wages. It was a claim only to slightly less unfair ones: a floor of twenty thousand rupees against the prevailing thirteen to fifteen thousand, fixed duty hours, overtime paid as overtime, arrears released, a mechanism against workplace harassment. Each item was already, in some form, the law of the land. The protest was a request that the law be allowed to mean what it said. The State's first reply was a baton charge. A few days later, the Uttar Pradesh government approved a revision of up to twenty-one per cent, a phrasing whose generosity lives in the announcement and not in the pay slip. In reality, only a small fraction of the workforce will see that figure. The majority will receive a meagre raise dressed in the rhetoric of a generous one, secured at the price of injury, arrest, and the public branding of the workers as disruptors. Even at its statutory ceiling, the increase does not meet the cost of sustaining a life. The political class then collected the revision as its own masterstroke. The workers, having put their bodies on the line for a wage that remained below dignity, would in due course return their votes to the hands that had charged them with batons. What the Indian growth story rests on, in the end, is a quiet, lawful, constitutionally coloured arrangement for keeping certain bodies cheap and available, and for keeping them silent.

Law often claims neutrality through rules and precedent, and Article 14 of the Constitution of India is repeatedly invoked to certify that claim. Yet over time a quiet inversion has taken place. Equal protection of the law has hardened into a procedural shield, while equality before the law has thinned into an abstraction. Legal doctrine increasingly treats unequal positions as if they were formally comparable, allowing real imbalance to pass as constitutional symmetry. This was not what the framers intended. B.R. Ambedkar, defending the draft Constitution before the Constituent Assembly, warned: “How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life? If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril. We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this Assembly has so laboriously built up.”^[1] Three quarters of a century later, the inequality has been preserved by the very legal vocabulary that was meant to dissolve it. The law does not merely fail to confront inequality. It holds it in place, and shelters that holding behind the veil of legality.

Infrastructure is expanding at an unprecedented scale: highways, expressways, ports, industrial corridors, rail networks, all sanctioned in figures running into lakhs of crores. These projects are celebrated as engines of growth and employment. Yet the framework that produces them remains indifferent to a basic question. How is the labourer, whose body physically produces this infrastructure, valued by law, by government, and by society? Labour is where the indifference shows most plainly, and where the law's pretence of neutrality fails most visibly to cover the disparity beneath.

In every large infrastructure project, value flows upward through a familiar hierarchy. The State accrues political and administrative capital. Principal contractors earn margins through contract design and risk allocation. Sub-contractors profit through cost arbitrage. Suppliers benefit from volume, machinery owners from rentals, financiers from interest, and consultants from fees. Each participant enters the project with something to negotiate and something to protect. The labourer enters with neither. He does not negotiate rates, escalation clauses, profit margins, mobilisation advances, or dispute remedies. Negotiation is the language of ownership and leverage, and he speaks none of it because he owns no part of the project: not capital, not contract, not machinery, not material, not even bargaining power. His relationship with the project is not, in any meaningful sense, contractual. It is consumptive. His body is deployed until it can no longer perform, and then replaced.

This imbalance is not accidental. It is built into the system. Marx, writing of an earlier industrial moment, observed that “capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”^[2] The contemporary infrastructure economy does not depart from this logic. It dresses it in legal and administrative form, and turns extraction into something regulated and routine.

That legal architecture is most visible in the four consolidated labour codes: the Code on Wages, 2019, the Industrial Relations Code, 2020, the Code on Social Security, 2020, and the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020. They are defended as simplification and formalisation. In substance, they produce a uniform, predictable and flexible labour force designed for project-based capital. Fixed-term employment is normalised. Contract labour expands. Thresholds for retrenchment and closure rise. Collective bargaining weakens precisely where labour is migrant, temporary, and fragmented by design. Cheap labour is not dismantled, rather is legalised. The minimum wage functions less as a floor than as a ceiling. Labour is formally registered, but not economically empowered.

The same movement is visible in employment policy. The rights-based architecture of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005, under which work was a legal entitlement enforceable against the State, has been displaced by the Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Bill, 2025, a scheme-based framework in which employment may be offered but cannot be demanded, and the State's failure to provide it carries no enforceable consequence. A right empowers. A scheme manages.

The consequences are also embedded in the arithmetic of growth. A project worth ₹1,00,000 crore distributes value across politicians, bureaucrats, contractors, sub-contractors, suppliers, financiers and consultants. At the end of this chain stands the labourer, earning ₹450 to ₹850 a day, often irregularly paid, rarely protected. The wealth circulates with endurance of infrastructure, excluding the labourer from both.

The pattern is visible in projects such as the Namma Metro in Bengaluru, built largely by migrant labour from Odisha, Bihar and Jharkhand earning between ₹500 and ₹700 a day, with payments routinely delayed against the city's high cost of living. Public records suggest that between 2007 and 2023 at least thirty-eight workers died and more than fifty were injured during construction. These figures almost certainly understate the actual position, because worksite fatalities outside the formal employment register rarely enter any record at all. The same pattern appears in highway construction under the Bharatmala Pariyojana^[3], where inter-state migrant labour is engaged through layered contracting systems marked by wage delays, weak enforcement and routine non-compliance with statutory protections such as the Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act, 1979. These are not isolated instances. Every construction project in India, irrespective of scale, across sectors and regions, reproduces the same truth. Value aggregates upward through institutional actors, while risk and precarity settle downward onto labour, which exits the system as it entered: without accumulation, without mobility, without recognition.

The invisibility of the builder is not incidental to this process. It is necessary to it. As Brecht asked of an earlier civilisation that mistook its monuments for its makers: “Who built Thebes of the seven gates? In the books you will find the names of kings.”^[4] The modern project record is no different. It documents capital, authority and execution, but not the labour that made execution possible.

Wage theft, viewed against this backdrop, is a system crystallised by the State. The India Labourline helpline, run by the Aajeevika Bureau and serving construction labour across northern and western Indian destination states, has, by its own published account, recorded more than 3,600 wage disputes by mid-2022 involving unpaid wages of approximately ₹8 crore. Only a fraction was recovered, and even that fraction came through mediation, which is settlement under situational coercion, not legal enforcement that would have secured the worker his full entitlement along with the compensation the law in principle allows. Migrant construction workers earn a median monthly income of around ₹9,000, which places many of them below statutory minimum wages even before intermediary deductions such as the jamadaar's cut are taken into account. The law, though formally available, remains practically out of reach. A worker earning that amount in a month cannot afford litigation without sacrificing wages, risking retaliation, or facing blacklisting. In a labour market defined by surplus and replaceability, silence becomes rational survival. Rights that demand the loss of livelihood to be exercised cease, in substance, to function as rights, and survive only as form.

These statistics, even where they exist, understate the condition, because they assume the worker is visible to the apparatus that might count him. He often is not. Whether his body counts as existing at all arises chiefly at the time of voting. Beyond that, little effort is made to know where, when, or even whether he was born. The Indian labourer is, in the State's eyes, an episodically registered presence. He may not appear in a death register because he died in a state where he was not from, on a worksite that did not list him, in an accident logged as “fall from height” without occupational attribution. He may carry an eShram card and a Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Board registration without either being usable when he needs them. His wages, when paid, are often paid in cash, off the books, against no document he is permitted to keep. To ask for empirical certainty about his life is to ask for documentation produced by a system whose function is to ensure that no documentation exists. The invisibility is a precondition to his dispensability. Before he is made cheap, he is made uncountable.

The same logic governs occupational health and compensation. Infrastructure work is inherently hazardous. Exposure to dust, silica, cement, chemicals, heat and unsafe machinery produces predictable injury, disease and premature death. Yet liability is not legally presumed, and healthcare for these workers, extended only minimally when extended at all, remains scheme-based, discretionary and after the fact. Even when liability is established, compensation remains conservative, calculated through minimum-wage assumptions and restrictive multipliers. Crore-level compensation for a labourer's death or permanent disability in occupational contexts remains rare. This is not because the harm suffered is lesser. It is because the injured body is that of a labourer. On the contrary, corporate losses and contractual breaches attract massive damages, where multipliers are applied more generously and notional incomes calculated more aggressively. Labour injury attracts judicial restraint. Equality before law survives as doctrine. Equality of valuation does not.

What emerges is a closed loop. Poverty ensures availability. Availability suppresses wages. Suppressed wages prevent savings. The absence of savings prevents resistance. The absence of resistance legitimises further flexibility. Weakness itself becomes an economic input. The framework does not need to openly exploit. It only needs to make dispensability ordinary.

The system does not correct itself. It refines its imbalance. When law makes dispensability ordinary, it reproduces domination, a reality observed long before the modern republic, in Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”^[5]

1. B.R. Ambedkar, Speech to the Constituent Assembly, 25 November 1949 (closing address on the adoption of the Constitution), in Constituent Assembly Debates, vol. XI. ↑

2. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I (1867), ch. 10 (“The Working Day”), trans. Ben Fowkes, Penguin edition (1976), p. 342. ↑

3. The CAG Report No. 19 of 2023, tabled on 10 August 2023, highlighted significant irregularities, including safety failures, improper DPR preparation, and contractor selection issues within the Bharatmala Pariyojana. ↑

4. Bertolt Brecht, “Questions from a Worker Who Reads” (“Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters”), 1935, trans. M. Hamburger, in Bertolt Brecht: Poems 1913–1956 (Methuen, 1976). ↑

5. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book V, ch. 89 (the Melian Dialogue), trans. Rex Warner, Penguin Classics (1972). ↑