This is the fourth and last article in a series on the recent protest by industrial workers in Noida for higher wages and improved working conditions. The series analyses what happened before and after April 13, the state and industry’s response and the conditions of work that provide the context. The report is based on ground reporting – interviews by the authors and independent media coverage. Read the other articles in in this series: Part one, part two and part three. On April 13-14, 2026, the night of mass protest and immediately after, seven first information reports (FIRs) were registered and over 300 people were detained, according to Gautam Buddha Nagar (GBN) Police Commissioner Laxmi Singh. Three FIRs were registered following complaints by Richa Global and Modelama Exports. Another named two X handles for posting false claims on April 13 about police firing and deaths among protesters. Police claimed both accounts were traced to Pakistan. Through April, additional FIRs were registered across different police stations as the investigation continued. The district administration ordered a magisterial inquiry, on May 7, into the protest and violence in areas falling under the Phase-2 and Sector 63 police station limits, aiming to establish whether the demonstrations were spontaneous or organised.On May 13, another FIR was registered in connection with allegedly inflammatory and misleading social media posts. On the same day, Uttar Pradesh (UP) police invoked the National Security Act (NSA) against activists Satyam Verma and Aakriti Choudhary. The act allows preventive detention without trial for up to one year. Police kept expanding the scope of investigation, and by May 13, according to different sources, 13 FIRs has been filed spanning dozens of criminal cases, with hundreds of named and unnamed accused across all FIRs combined. Specific charges include Sections 353(1) and 353(2) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), dealing with statements and rumours inciting public mischief or disorder, as well as Section 66 of the Information Technology Act, pertaining to the dishonest or fraudulent use of digital platforms. The so-called “key conspirators” have also been charged with criminal conspiracy, attempted murder and endangering public safety. Police personnel are seen as Police Commissioner of Gautam Buddh Nagar Lakshmi Singh visits Sector 80 amid ongoing workers’ protest, in Noida, Tuesday, April 14, 2026. Photo: PTI.The UP government claimed at least 66 “key individuals” were formally arrested, asserting that 45 of them were not factory workers but “external elements” who had incited violence. Among those arrested were workers and activists Aditya Anand, Rupesh Roy, Satyam Verma and Himanshu Thakur, who were described by police as the “masterminds” behind the April 13 violence. At least seven activists, including three women, were arrested as key accused in connection with orchestrating the violence. In all, as of May 17, at least 13 FIRs have been registered across multiple police stations (Phase-2, Sector 63, Sector 20 and Surajpur), with 66 formally arrested and charges ranging from attempted murder and criminal conspiracy to IT Act violations and NSA detention.The macro context: Noida as a story of growth with precarityIn an article published in the Indian Express on April 28, Uttar Pradesh’s Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath argued that youth leaving their janmabhoomi (native state) for a karmabhoomi (place of work) is a compulsion or a forced migration, not driven by aspiration. He further stated that employment, particularly for the youth, is central to UP’s development narrative. A range of initiatives, such as Mission Rozgar, Rozgar Mahakumbh, Yuva Udyami Scheme and ITI Chalo Abhiyan, were presented as solutions, aligning with national programmes like Make in India and Atmanirbhar Bharat. Together, he said, they project a state actively generating opportunities for its youth.But what does the employment landscape actually look like on ground? According to 2023-24 data, out of UP’s 5.27 crore youth population (aged 15-29), nearly 30% are neither pursuing education nor employment (NEET). The gender gap is even more striking: around 60% of young women fall into this category. National youth NEET rates hover between 24% and 33%. If we look beyond the youth, the Labour Force Participation Rate (LFPR), or the proportion of people either working or actively seeking employment in the state, remains consistently below the national average, both in 2017-18 and 2024-25. For those who are working, the nature of employment tells a dismal story. Self-employment dominates the labour market. Of 7.36 crore workers, 5.35 crore are self-employed, with their share rising from 64% to 73% between 2017 and 2024. Within this category, 62% are own-account workers (running small, individual enterprises) and 35% are unpaid family workers. This means that 26% of the total workforce, about 1.89 crore, were engaged as unpaid family labour in 2023-24. Factory workers during a protest demanding a hike in wages, in Noida, Gautam Buddh Nagar district, Uttar Pradesh, Monday, April 13, 2026. Photo: PTI.The precarious nature of this self-employment is reflected in extremely low incomes. 88% of self-employed workers report monthly per capita consumption expenditure between Rs 1,300 and Rs 5,000. From 2017 to 2024, nearly all new jobs generated in UP were in the form of self-employment, a share significantly higher than the national average. 87% of female workers in the state are self-employed. Among self-employed workers, around 50% receive monthly incomes exceeding Rs 5,000, based on current weekly status data, reflecting how low the baseline is. Labour in GBN and what do workers earn?Against this backdrop, Gautam Budh Nagar, including Noida and Greater Noida, presents a curious contrast. As of 2026, it is the richest and fastest-growing district in the state, with a per capita income roughly ten times the state average, surpassing Japan in income. It contributes roughly 25% of total revenue and 10% of total state output and hosts thousands of industrial units and export-oriented factories. By almost every indicator, it is a success story of industrialisation and growth. One of the largest platforms for company data, Ambition Box, lists 252 companies in Noida: 47 public limited and the remainder private limited. Their size ranges from medium to large, with 34% (86 companies) employing up to 1,000 workers, 23% (57) employing 1,000-5,000 workers and 16% (42) employing 5,000-50,0000 workers. Other estimates put the number of garment factories alone at 3,500-4,000, a mix of large exporters and several subcontracted units. Noida authorities claim approximately 11,000 industrial units in the district in total.According to Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data, most workers in Noida are classified as regular wage employees. This is distinctly different UP’s high concentration of self-employed workers. In Noida, out of 9.85 lakh workers, 5.66 lakh are regular workers. In urban Noida, out of 6.89 lakh, 4.73 are regular workers. In Noida, 52% of female workers and 36% male workers have no social security. 55% of women and 40% of men workers have no written contract, even when they are documented as regular workers. 49% of female workers and 34% of male workers have no paid leave entitlement.Thus, despite being a high-growth district reporting high levels of formal employment, conditions remain highly dismal. Job tenure is short and worker turnover is high. The labour market is highly gender differentiated: a significant share of women face long spells of unemployment and 47% report unemployment lasting two to three years. The reasons behind this are structural. There is a lack of childcare, inflexible work conditions and the added double-burden of home and work responsibilities, which push women out of the workforce. A persistent gender wage gap, women in Noida only earning 64% of male wages in regular employment (a gap even wider than state and national averages), compounds the problem. In 2025, UP launched the “ITI Chalo Abhiyan” to boost skill development and improve employment prospects. In partnership with Tata Technologies, 149 government ITIs were to provide 11 comprehensive training programmes, designed to match the evolving industry needs. A large number of young women and men whose testimonies were recorded during and after the April 13 protest had come from these very ITIs, earning a salary of Rs 12,000-14,000. Also read: Engineers, Journalists, Students: The Faces Behind UP Police’s Arrests in Noida Workers’ ProtestThe emphasis on technology and digital employment in UP is not a recent development. As early as the inaugural session of the UP Investors Summit in 2018, the state introduced Nivesh Mitra, a digital single-window clearance portal. Its tagline, “Advantage UP,” highlighted the state as India’s third-largest economy, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.39% from 2015-16 to 2021-22, a 23% increase in per capita income and a “robust workforce” – 56% of the population within the working-age group. The Noida protest workers’ situation shows that it is precisely this “robust workforce” that was left to rot in Noida’s industries on starvation wages. Labour welfare, public expenditure and fiscal disciplineIn official policy circles, the ‘bimaru’ perception of Uttar Pradesh has shifted considerably. According to NITI Aayog, banks are now eager to finance projects in the state. Despite a big population of 25 crore, UP is now a revenue-surplus state, recognised for its “prudent and efficient financial management,” contrasting with its past record. This claim of economic success is further validated by Arvind Panagariya, chief of the 16th Finance Commission, who asserts that despite having the second-lowest per capita income in the country, Uttar Pradesh has emerged as one of India’s “best-managed states” financially. The reputation rests on the state’s commitment to fiscal discipline, curbing expenditure, boosting tax collections as a percentage of GDP and sustaining a sound debt profile. UP has also grabbed headlines for spending more on welfare in absolute terms than it ever has, converging closer to the national average on health expenditure, though on a per-capita basis it remains among the worst-positioned states. So, when the state government speaks of worker welfare and funds various welfare schemes, how realistic are these claims given the concurrent statements of revenue surplus and high welfare spending? UP’s revenue surplus and its high public expenditure announcements are not contradictory, they coexist because of systematic underspending. A revenue surplus simply means that revenue receipts exceed revenue expenditure. It says nothing about whether capital spending was high. UP can simultaneously declare massive welfare budgets and post a revenue surplus if it routinely fails to spend what it allocates. And, that is exactly what has happened. Between 2015-16 and 2019-20, UP’s revenue receipts were 8% lower than budgeted figures on average. Its tax revenue fell 8% below budget estimates, while the central government grants were 39% lower than budgeted figures. The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) observed that the state has been under-spending across sectors consistently. In 2020-21, actual state expenditure was Rs 3,50,780 crore, which is 26% below the budget estimate. In 2021-22, the state spent 11% less than what was budgeted. Between 2015-16 and 2022-23, UP raised 13% less revenue than estimated while its expenditure was 16% lower. In 2023-24, actual revenue receipts were 18% under budget estimates and net expenditure was 17% below budgeted figures. The revenue surplus, in short, is largely a residue of underspending, not a reward for efficient high expenditure. This emphasis on favourable fiscal headlines, and the projection of high public expenditure without delivering commensurate outcomes, is a well-considered strategy to support the private sector and boost investor confidence through foreign direct investment (FDI) and domestic investment. Cumulative FDI equity flow between October 2019 to March 2024 in UP was Rs 12,615 crores (or $1635 million), amounting to one percent of the total national equity flow in the period. Jharkhand and Rajasthan also noted one percent and Telangana, Haryana and Tamil Nadu received 3-5%, while Delhi, Gujarat, Karnataka and Maharashtra got the remaining share. As for the domestic private investment, MoU-to-project realisation rates of roughly 7% indicate that the gap between investor summits and ground-level investment remains vast.Whatever investment has materialised, and the kind of jobs and conditions it has produced, is exemplified by the workers’ experience.ConclusionThe Noida labour protest of April-May 2026 began as a remarkably simple and largely spontaneous assertion: workers who had endured years of stagnant wages, exhausting hours, humiliation on the shop floor and the slow collapse of everyday life stepped outside factory gates to convey that survival itself had become untenable. What followed, however, was not merely an official attempt to restore calm. The protest was steadily stripped of its meaning. Mainstream television converted a largely peaceful mobilisation into a spectacle of lawlessness; neighbourhood panic recast workers as a threatening mass; and the state, even while offering hurried and opaque relief, moved quickly to frame the unrest in the language of provocation, outside instigation, organised syndicates and national-security threat. In that shift, the workers’ demands for wages and dignity were no longer treated as a questions of fairness and became something to be managed through surveillance, detention, criminal law and political suspicion.Also read: Noida Protests: Arrested Activists Tell Supreme Court Police Were on WhatsApp Group, Had a Role in Inciting ViolenceThe protest may have forced a wage revision and welfare assurances – their actual impact will only be known when the pay slips are handed over – but many of the promised benefits remain uncertain in implementation even as arrests continue, workers languish in jail and fear spreads through factories, neighbourhoods and workers’ colonies. Meanwhile, industry pushback and the rapid move to scrap overtime exposed how quickly even limited gains could be reworked in favour of employers. Noida’s development story rests on a labour regime that keeps workers insecure, underpaid and easily disposable. When that regime was challenged collectively, the response was revealing: benevolence on paper, coercion on the ground; welfare in announcement, repression in practice. If this report establishes anything, it is that the criminalisation of the Noida protest was not an accidental excess in an otherwise sympathetic response. It was integral to the way the state, capital and much of the mainstream media sought to contain a moment in which workers briefly made visible the hidden costs of the state’s celebrated success. The UP government also appears to have used this moment to do something more than suppress an immediate protest. It punished solidarities and broke the very possibility of pro-labour networks of activists, public intellectuals, lawyers and labour-rights researchers. The arrests of activists, the labelling of organisers as “masterminds,” the addition of severe criminal provisions and the apparent effort to make bail difficult all point to a form of exemplary punishment meant for those detained and a wider public of sympathisers. In that sense, the repression is pedagogic as much as punitive: it seeks to recast democratic work, through fact-finding, public speech or solidarity work, as conspiracy. Read in the context of the broader response documented in this report, this reveals a harshly pro-capital and authoritarian mode of governance in which ‘vikas’ is secured through surveillance, intimidation and the criminalisation of dissent. What is at stake, then, is not the fate of a particular protest. It is the shrinking of the civic and political space in which labour can organise and be heard at all.Navsharan Singh is an independent researcher and activist. Atul Sood teaches at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Rakhi Sehgal is an independent labour researched with over two decades of association with the trade union movement.