What we are witnessing is not governance, but governance weaponised – where laws are bent to favour capital, institutions are neutered to silence workers, and the entire machinery of the state is marshalled to break the spine of labour.
Published Jun 15, 2025 | 9:00 AM ⚊ Updated Jun 15, 2025 | 9:00 AM
India’s fall in the ITUC index is a wake-up call. We must not allow our sense of national pride to blind us to our moral failure.
Synopsis: In the latest International Trade Union Confederation Global Rights Index, India has been downgraded to the worst possible rating – Category 5 – indicating no guarantee of workers’ rights. This places India in the same bracket as authoritarian regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, Colombia, Cambodia, and 33 others, where trade union freedoms are severely restricted or entirely suppressed.
In 2025, India stands condemned – not by imperialist forces or hostile neighbours, but by the lived experiences of its own working class.
The latest International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) Global Rights Index delivers a damning verdict: India remains at rating ‘5’ – a category it now shares with countries such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, Colombia, Cambodia, and 33 others.
This is not merely a diplomatic embarrassment or a policy failure; it is an international indictment of a country that calls itself the world’s largest democracy while systematically oppressing its workers.
This shameful ranking is no accident. It is the inevitable consequence of a state that has chosen crony capitalism over constitutional morality, surveillance over solidarity, and profit over people.
What we are witnessing is not governance, but governance weaponised – where laws are bent to favour capital, institutions are neutered to silence workers, and the entire machinery of the state is marshalled to break the spine of labour.
The ITUC report lays bare a disturbing truth: in contemporary India, core labour rights exist largely on paper.
The right to strike is criminalised, trade unions face systemic barriers to registration, and collective bargaining is deliberately obstructed through legal design.
Surveillance of organisers is rampant, while arbitrary arrests of protesters have become routine.
Civil society organisations working with informal and migrant labourers are persecuted under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA), branded “anti-national” for speaking up for the marginalised.
Though India’s Constitution promises freedom of association, collective bargaining, and the right to strike, the legal and administrative machinery does the opposite.
Trade union formation is stifled by high membership thresholds, red tape, and limits on leadership eligibility – particularly in the informal sector and among public employees.
Employers are not legally bound to recognise unions, and stringent thresholds – such as requiring support from 66 percent of the workforce – further weaken bargaining power.
Strikes, while technically legal, are undermined by lengthy notice periods, ambiguous definitions of “essential services,” and harsh penalties including imprisonment.
States like Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, and Manipur use sweeping powers to prohibit strikes and criminalise dissent.
In effect, India’s democracy is not merely neglecting its workers – it is actively silencing them.
Consider the story of Shivamma. Born in the remote Errapenta village of a Chenchu village in Achampet mandal, Telangana, Shivamma belonged to the Chenchu tribe.
Her parents were bonded labourers who died in servitude. Orphaned and impoverished, Shivamma and her sister were forced to carry cement bags at age 11 while their uncle pocketed their wages.
Her life was one of hunger and silence – until, in desperation, she attempted suicide. It was only by chance, during a routine visit by government staff to the village that day, that she was rescued and survived.
Marriage brought no reprieve. Lured by a ₹25,000 advance, she and her husband were trafficked to Rajasthan for road construction.
For three years, they lived in open fields, denied wages, medical care, and even the basic dignity of freedom. When three of her co-workers escaped and alerted workers’ rights activists, the contractor panicked.
He crammed 55 workers into a van and fled across state borders, shuttling them between Rajasthan, Telangana, and Karnataka to avoid detection. After a week of evasion, the Karnataka police and the activists finally intercepted the van in Bijapur.
The workers were rescued in 2014. But their ordeal was far from over.
The Banswara collector in Rajasthan refused to issue release certificates, arguing the rescue did not occur in his jurisdiction.
The Bijapur administration in Karnataka dismissed them as “transit migrants.” In bureaucratic limbo, Shivamma and her fellow workers were denied recognition, compensation, or rehabilitation. Free on paper, invisible in practice.
Then there is Mukesh, a once-proud figure from Shivpuri, Madhya Pradesh. In 2023, traffickers lured him and his wife with promises of farm work.
They were taken to Karnataka and trapped in forced labour alongside 80 others in a sugarcane field. Their passports were seized.
When Mukesh protested the non-payment of wages and the practice of renting workers to other landlords, he was singled out, chained, and brutally assaulted.
His leg was shattered, permanently damaged. He received no medical care. Word of his plight reached activists through a desperate phone call during a staged family conversation.
A rescue was eventually mounted. The owner fled. Mukesh survived – but today, he lies on a charpoy, immobilised and reliant on painkillers. His wife shoulders the burden of feeding the family.
Their dreams are now limited to healing and hope.
These stories are not exceptions. They are the rule in an India where nearly 90 percent of the workforce is informal, without contracts, rights, or representation.
They are the reality behind the high walls of gated cities, the gleaming towers of economic growth, and the promises of digital development.
These workers build our roads, harvest our crops, clean our homes, stitch our clothes – and are rewarded with exploitation, abandonment, and silence.
India’s fall in the ITUC index is rooted in political intent.
The Modi government’s decision to bulldoze through the four Labour Codes during the pandemic – while the country was locked down and workers were walking home barefoot – was not about reform.
It was about removing decades of hard-won protections. The Industrial Relations Code made it easier to sack workers without oversight. The Occupational Safety Code diluted existing safety norms.
The Social Security Code digitised entitlements without delivering them. And all this was done without meaningful consultation with trade unions, who were systematically excluded from dialogue.
The government speaks of “formalisation,” but what it really offers is surveillance without support. Portals like e-Shram harvest biometric data but have failed to translate that into benefits on the ground.
India refuses to ratify ILO conventions C87 and C98 – on freedom of association and collective bargaining – despite being a founding member.
This is not a failure of diplomacy; it is a message to investors: India is open for business, and closed to unions.
The 2020 migrant exodus should have been a national reckoning. Instead, it was met with apathy. In the months that followed, a few states suspended labour laws altogether, turning workers into tools of post-COVID economic revival.
No national law for migrant workers emerged. Trafficking networks remained unchecked. Domestic workers continued to be trafficked to Arab Gulf countries under the gaze of a complicit state.
Laws meant to protect against bonded labour were weakened by administrative inaction and jurisdictional blame games.
Labour unrest, once a legitimate democratic expression, is now met with the full force of the state.
Workers at automobile factories, warehouses, and garment factories who attempted to unionise have faced arrests, dismissals, and police brutality.
The government does not engage with unions – it treats them as enemies. By labelling protests as seditious or foreign-funded, it has criminalised collective resistance.
This is not merely a labour crisis. It is a democratic collapse. What value does voting hold if workers cannot strike, unionise, or demand fair wages without fear? What meaning does freedom have when organising is criminalised?
India’s fall in the ITUC index is a wake-up call. We must not allow our sense of national pride to blind us to our moral failure.
We must confront the reality that our growth is built on the backs of broken bodies. That our global standing is diminished not just by our human rights record, but by our silence in the face of systematic dehumanisation.
We need not tinkering, but transformation. India must ratify ILO Conventions 87 and 98. It must restore tripartite dialogue.
It must reverse the regressive Labour Codes. It must treat bonded labourers like Shivamma and Mukesh not as statistics but as citizens. Without release certificates and rehabilitation, their freedom is fiction.
We must begin to ask different questions: not how many unicorns India breeds, but how many workers retire with dignity.
Not how many billionaires top the global charts, but how many construction workers’ children finish school. A nation is not judged by its Sensex – it is judged by how it treats its most vulnerable.
In 2025, India is failing that test. But we can still choose differently – if we listen to the voices from the fields, the factories, and the picket lines.
If we remember that labour rights are human rights. And that without them, democracy is just a lie we tell ourselves.
(The writer is an independent journalist and labour rights investigator who has documented migrant and informal labour violations across India and the Arab Gulf for over 15 years. He is the author of ‘Undocumented’ [Penguin, 2021]. Edited by Dese Gowda)
