Over 1 lakh pending cases: Noida burned after years of silence in labour courts

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 much older fire. The Registrar of the Labour Court in Noida told Newslaundry that more than 4,500 cases are currently pending before their court, with the oldest one dating back to 2008.

The labour crisis in the making

The Moser Baer case is just one of more than 1.14 lakh.

Newslaundry pulled data from the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG), a national repository for data on cases filed, pending, and disposed of at the district and state levels across India. As of  May 8, 2026, more than 1.14 lakh labour and industrial dispute cases were pending before state-level Labour Courts and Industrial Tribunals: 70,143 labour and 44,602 industrial matters. Of these, roughly 1.12 lakh are civil disputes, while the other 2,293 are criminal.

The central sphere is no better. In its Eighth Report on the Industrial Relations Code, 2019 — presented to Parliament on April 23, 2020 — the Standing Committee on Labour recorded approximately 23,000 cases pending across the 22 Central Government Industrial Tribunal-cum-Labour Courts (CGITs). On September 21, 2020, then Labour Minister Santosh Kumar Gangwar told the Lok Sabha that 8,008 of those cases had been pending for more than five years.

At the High Court level, more than 1,500 labour and industrial cases are pending across India, according to NDJG.

Such backlogs are often sustained by the maze-like, multi-tiered grievance redressal system, where workers must navigate years of hearings, paperwork and appeals. The process demands time, persistence and money – resources that distressed workers can rarely afford.

India’s labour grievance redressal system

When a worker in India falls into dispute with their employer — over a sudden dismissal, unpaid wages, denied benefits, or any other reason — the law does not let them walk straight to court. It sets out a five-tier ladder, multiple government offices, and a process that drags on for years even in routine cases.

The first rung is inside the workplace itself. Under the Industrial Relations Code, 2020, every firm employing 20 or more workers must constitute an in-house Grievance Redressal Committee (GRC), with equal representation from workers and the employer. Ideally, the worker has to take the complaint here first. The committee has 30 days to decide, and the complaint must be filed within a year of the dispute arising. Several employees that we interviewed told us that their companies never had any GRC.

If the worker doesn’t accept the committee’s decision or the committee fails to decide within 30 days, the dispute moves out of the workplace. Under Section 4 of the Industrial Relations Code, 2020, the worker has 60 days to approach a government-appointed conciliation officer.

The workers employed in the central-sphere industries, like railways, banks (public and private), insurance companies, mines, oilfields, major ports, cantonment boards, and central PSUs, etc., go to the Chief Labour Commissioner (Central). Everyone else reaches their state Labour Department, headed by the state Labour Commissioner, with district offices handling the actual conciliation. 

For instance, the workers in a private firm like Moser Baer in Greater Noida approached the District Labour Commissioner of Gautam Buddha Nagar, an office of the UP Labour Department. The officers have 45 days to mediate and broker a settlement, but they cannot pass binding orders.

If conciliation fails, the dispute moves to a tribunal. The cases from CLC (Central) go to the Central Government Industrial Tribunal-cum-Labour Court Delhi-I, while those from Noida, Ghaziabad, Gurgaon or Faridabad against a central-sphere employer go to CGIT Delhi-II. Cases of Noida private-sector workers move to the Labour Court, Gautam Buddha Nagar. If still not satisfied with the verdict, the workers can appeal to the High Court and eventually, the Supreme Court. 

The Moser Baer case

Padmakar Rajput, the technician who joined Moser Baer in January 2004 and worked there for close to 14 years, told us that the signs of distress in the Greater Noida plant had begun back in 2016. He said the company bus services were withdrawn, and the workers had to find their own conveyance, even for the early morning shifts, which began at 6:30 am. “The insurance policy was discontinued, and medical cover for workers outside the ESI bracket was withdrawn. The canteen, where the company had earlier subsidised meals, started charging high prices.” 

Salaries began arriving late, and by 2017, the delays had grown so long enough that the workers couldn’t immediately tell which month’s pay was coming, Rajput claimed.

When the plant was shut, the distressed workers approached the offices of the District Magistrate and the Deputy Labour Commissioner (DLC) multiple times. On November 14, the DLC issued a notice stating that the plant’s lockout was illegal and should be lifted with immediate effect. Instead of following his orders, the same day, the company’s financial creditors filed an insolvency petition with the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT). The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) moratorium, a legally mandated “calm period”, was initiated, and the labour proceedings froze the same day. The company went into liquidation on September 20, 2018. 

More than seven years later, the workers’ provident fund, gratuity, retrenchment dues and full settlement are still pending, they claimed. For the past six years, the workers claimed, they have received little from the NCLT except new hearing dates. 

Among those who lost their livelihood was B V Lal, who was close to retirement when the plant was shut. He allegedly had a stroke. For more than a year, he was in and out of the hospital and then bedridden at home. He died in late 2018. His son, who was in school, had to discontinue his studies to support the family. The boy and his family had dreamt that he would be an engineer one day. Today, he works at another factory in Noida, just like his father. 

At Delhi hospital, sacked for ‘demanding a hike’

When Sunita came to Delhi from Bulandshahr as a new bride in 1995, she had not imagined that she would spend years mopping hospital floors and toilets, emptying bedpans, and clearing medical waste. 

But when her husband lost his job with the housekeeping staff at New Delhi Railway Station in 2014, and the financial burden made it difficult to send the children to school, she had to step out to work. She joined as a sanitation worker at a children’s hospital in Delhi under a contract with Sulabh International. 

The job, in principle, was sweeping, mopping, and cleaning the toilets. In practice, her petition states, it stretched well beyond that. And even then, she claims that she was paid only Rs 3,500 though she was promised Rs 7,500 a month.

The workday was often extended without any overtime. Sunita says that during the lunch break, workers were often asked to clean residential quarters without any extra payment. “When we refused, they threatened with dismissal…There were no holidays, and taking leave during festivals often meant salary deductions for two days.” 

The women workers were made to dispose of biomedical waste and handle tasks officially assigned to ward staff. “When unclaimed infant dead bodies remained in the hospital for days, the sanitation workers were allegedly asked to wrap them and carry them to the mortuary freezer themselves,” Sunita said. “You stop feeling anything after a point.” 

In 2019, Sunita and 36 other workers filed a petition and demanded a wage hike. By June 2022, all 37 of them were fired. Many former workers fell into debt after losing their jobs, borrowing small sums of Rs 5,000 to 10,000 at a time just to pay rent or buy food. 

Sunita and the lawyer representing sanitation workers told Newslaundry, “Until 2016, they were given barely Rs 3,500 in hand. Even after wages were formally revised, the gap allegedly continued. In 2019, when the official salary rose to Rs 10,500, they were paid only Rs 7,500. By 2021, the formal salary had increased to Rs 18,000, but according to Sunita, workers continued to receive only Rs 10,500.”  

Today, Sunita has found work under another contractor. But she claims the system at Kalawati Hospital remains largely unchanged. And 10 years after first approaching labour authorities, Sunita, now 50, still spends her time moving between labour offices and tribunals. She recalls repeated visits to the Labour Commissioner’s offices in Connaught Place and Dwarka. The labour court, she says, later ordered the reinstatement of the dismissed workers, but the order remains unenforced.

“If they don’t obey the court, then what is the court there for?” Sunita asked. “People should just fight among themselves then.”

Newslaundry reached out to Sulabh International and Moser Baer for comment. This report will be updated if a response is received.

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