This is the first in a series of articles 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.On April 13, 2026, hundreds of factory workers across nearly 80 sites in Noida refused, for once, to disappear behind factory gates. They gathered outside instead – before shuttered entrances, many with placards bearing a single demand: “Salary 20,000.” There were no union banners, no flags, no flexes, just the simple cardboard placards. It was not a slogan so much as a line drawn against hunger.Speaking to dozens of YouTube channels, workers described surviving on Rs 11,000–Rs 13,000 a month, wages too thin to hold together food, rent, cooking gas, school fees and the sheer cost of remaining alive. Their numbers swelled and they forced shutdowns and blocked traffic for hours.A series of similar wage hike demands had already been raised by workers at Honda’s scooter and motorcycle manufacturing plant in Manesar, Haryana, on April 2. From there, it spread to Munjal Showa Limited on April 4, at a plant located behind Honda, then to Satyam Auto and Roop Polymers by April 6 and from there to garment companies such as Richa Global and Modelama by April 8.Workers came out of three of six Richa Global factories in Manesar. Haryana announced a wage revision on April 9, 2026. This wage revision was the first actual revision of wages in nearly 11 years.Haryana minimum wages for highly skilled workers, 2016-20262016Rs 10300.142017Rs 10567.85Jan 2018Rs 10845.27Jul 2018Rs 10901.522019Rs 11266.23Jul 2021Rs 12511.65Jan 2023Rs 13442.822024Rs 14041.30Jan 2025Rs 14367.21Jul 2025Rs 14389.522026Rs 19425.85Despite a 35% hike in April 2026 prompted by recent protests, the minimum wage remains below Rs 20,000, even for highly skilled workers.After they won a wage hike, workers of Richa Global factories in Noida – it has five factories in the industrial township – and workers of Motherson Sumi Wiring (an automobile parts manufacturing firm) started asking for a similar wage increase. What began as a three or four-day protest inside the factories intensified April 13 onwards.This mobilisation had not been built by unions over months; it flared, perhaps through social media and personal communications, in a matter of days. Because hunger, mistreatment and non-response were already experienced everywhere, the protest leapt quickly across industrial clusters and unrelated sectors, even drawing in domestic workers who know the same economy of underpayment and disregard.April 13: Day of mass protest – and what followedWorkers gathered and initial protests began in Sector 62 but rapidly spread to other industrial and high traffic zones on April 13. Key locations where protests erupted were the hosiery complex and areas around the Motherson factory in Phase 2, the metro station near Sector 60, factories in Sector 63, Sector 15 and the Phase 1 area.According to senior police officials, about 42,000 workers had gathered and staged demands at 83 locations in Noida. The protests were peaceful but road blocks caused major traffic jams at several intersections, including on the main Dadri road which connects Noida to Delhi from Mayur Vihar.According to the police, the protest turned violent only at two places with stone-pelting and vehicle vandalism, leading to the use of tear gas to disperse the crowd. Gautam Buddh Nagar Police Commissioner Laxmi Singh said that at the two spots where the protests escalated into violence and arson, the authorities used minimal and judicious force to bring the situation under control.Of the over 80 places in Noida where workers protested, even according to the police, the protest turned violent only at two places and was brought under control fairly soon.However, mainstream media coverage remained fixated almost entirely on these two sites, turning what were limited incidents into the defining image of the entire protest. By repeatedly broadcasting the same visuals of burning vehicles, broken barricades and clashes, television channels created a sense of widespread chaos far beyond what had actually occurred. It did not simply exaggerate the scale of the unrest; it actively contributed to presenting workers as lawless.The sensational coverage reduced the protest to a spectacle of disorder, where workers were not aggrieved citizens making simple demands, but a threatening mob that had brought the entire NCR region to its knees. The protest was being recast as a problem of criminality and control.Garment company workers at ‘hosiery complex’ protest demanding a wage hike, in Gautam Buddh Nagar district, Uttar Pradesh, Saturday, April 11, 2026. Photo: PTI.The criminalisation was further intensified through circuits of rumour and panic among middle-class residents living in nearby posh sectors. In resident welfare association WhatsApp groups, messages circulated warning that a “civil war” had begun and asking what if the mobs came into their colonies to burn and loot. These messages were shaped by class prejudice, yet they spread and gained credibility precisely because they echoed the dominant media narrative of chaos and breakdown.The language of rampaging mobs and disorder drew upon older fears of the urban poor as inherently violent, sharpening the moral divide between respectable residents and a supposedly dangerous working class.Torrent of grievancesIt was largely on a few independent media platforms and YouTube channels that a different account of the events emerged. Unlike mainstream television ‘godi’ media coverage, which allowed the few incidents of confrontation to stand in for the protest as a whole, these channels showed how most of the demonstrations remained peaceful and foregrounded the grievances that had brought workers onto the streets.It was this ground reporting which brought out the testimonies of workers, giving them space and revealing years of neglect, hunger, management refusals to listen and a factory regime in which dignity was eroded day after day.Several workers described being treated “like animals”. They were not seasoned leaders or trained spokespersons, but ordinary workers – women and men, many of them very young – speaking with visible anger, fatigue and difficulty. The daily humiliations spilled out as workers spoke, sometimes struggling to continue and yet when they spoke, the shop floor came with them.They spoke of starvation wages, the tyranny of targets and the indignities heaped on them: of being made to stand on tables as punishment for missing targets and one woman described bleeding during menstruation, with blood visible on the floor, yet still being denied even a brief pause because targets have to be met and production could not stop.If these testimonies carried a literary force, it arose not from embellishment but from the sheer weight of what had been endured and from the effort it took to narrate it at all.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty. Photo: Intifada P. Basheer and Azam Abbas.Workers repeatedly testified that they were made to work 14, sometimes 16 hours a day, yet their wages still did not last until the end of the month. Overtime, they said, was unavoidable, but it was often not paid properly: it was not compensated at double rate and at times was not fully paid at all. Many also reported being denied salary slips, so even documentary proof of their labour could be withheld. They described swollen feet after standing all day and a daily routine in which there was no real option of stopping.A weekly day off meant a wage cut; slowing down invited abuse; falling ill meant the possibility of being replaced. As several testimonies made clear, workers kept going because stopping was no option – children had to be fed, rents had to be paid. At the same time, rising prices were making survival still harder. The cost of cooking they said, had risen so sharply that even when money for a cylinder could somehow be gathered, it was not always available. Month after month, life became a painful exercise in deciding what to buy, what to defer and what to silently endure.Many described having come to the city with hopes that hard work would make life a little more stable, especially for their children. But those hopes, as the testimonies suggested again and again, had been shattered – under the weight of long shifts, stolen wages, insults, debts and unending worry. More than one worker expressed a sense of reaching the limits of endurance, captured in the oft-repeated phrase: bardasht se bahar hai, ab nahi hota.Deep humiliation and a wound to the heartIllness and accident appeared in the testimonies as moments when an already fragile life could collapse all at once. A fever, an injury or a few days without work, they explained, were enough to shake an entire household. In such moments, many said, they were forced to do the very thing migration had been meant to prevent: call home and ask for money from the families they had left behind to support. Several described this not simply as an economic problem but as a deep humiliation and a wound to the heart: Mummy ko kaise bataye ki koi paisa nahi hai? (How do I tell my mother back home that I have no money?)Again and again, testimonies returned to the fear that one sickness, one accident or one bad week could undo months and years of hard labour. What emerged from these accounts was not only precarity, but the slow experience of inward breaking, summed up by workers in the words: bas hamari tankhah badha do (we are just asking for a raise, that’s all.)Also read: The Worker Who Doesn’t Belong: Migrant Labour, Bihari Identity, and the Violence of the Indian CityWorkers also spoke of wages virtually unchanged for years. Several said they had continued on the same salary for two, three, even five years, with annual increments as low as Rs 29 – an amount they described with bitter irony as little more than a joke. In their accounts, the insult lay not only in the smallness of the raise, but in the contrast it exposed: even the price of a samosa had risen many times over in the same period, while their wages remained almost still.Many said that they had moved from garments to automobiles and back again, changing sectors in the hope of improvement, only to find that nothing meaningful changed so far as pay was concerned. What these accounts revealed was not simply low wages but a deeper structure of deskilling, in which years of labour did not accumulate into recognition as experience or skill. Instead, workers remained trapped on the lowest rungs of the industrial ladder, their time, effort and mobility failing to translate into any real advancement.An injured factory worker during a protest demanding a hike in wages, in Noida, Gautam Buddh Nagar district, Uttar Pradesh, Monday, April 13, 2026. Photo: PTI.Workers also made clear that humiliation did not end with the factory shift. Even after returning at night to rented rooms, many encountered a different version of the same command. If rent was delayed, they were told to leave; in the factory, if targets were not met or extra hours could not be worked, they were again told to leave. In testimony after testimony, this repetition acquired a larger meaning: whether voiced by supervisors or landlords, the message was the same. Workers were wanted only so long as they could produce, pay, obey and endure. The moment they could not, they became disposable.Several accounts conveyed the sadness of living under the constant threat of expulsion and the gradual feeling of not belonging anywhere at all. This too formed part of the emotional landscape of the protest and part of the breaking point workers described in the refrain, aise thoda hota hai, har jagah bas yehi, nikal jao, nikal jao. (How is it even fair that everywhere we go, we are told to get out, get out?)A path of no escapeWorkers also testified to the denial of even the smallest forms of security. Phones were not allowed inside the factory, which meant that once they entered, they were cut off from their families. If something happened at home, they would not know; if something happened to them, their families would not know. Outside the factory gates, they said they had to pay tea stalls or paan shops ten rupees a day to keep their phones. Remaining connected to their families had become another cost of labour.Lockers were not provided either, so personal belongings had to be left outside, by the roadside, with strangers and to chance. Though such details might appear minor, the testimonies suggested that they were experienced as part of a larger pattern of indignity. The insult did not lie only in low wages or long hours, but in these daily denials: being watched, abused, denied breaks, denied a place to sit, denied even a safe place for one’s belongings, denied the reassurance that one could be reached in an emergency.Perhaps most painfully, many testimonies returned to the hopes with which workers had come to the city in the first place. They had migrated, many women said, with the hope that their children would not have to live the same life they had lived. Hard work and sacrifice were meant to secure schooling, dignity and the possibility of a different future. Yet again and again, workers described that hope as one that was slowly breaking.Government schools were poor, private schools were far too expensive and the absence of creches meant that older children often had to stay home to care for younger siblings. In these accounts, one child missed school so another could be fed; one child learned care work before books. What emerged was a profound sense that the very life workers had tried to leave behind was being passed into the next generation. Several suggested that while they could, for a time, endure their own hunger, fatigue and humiliation, what was hardest to bear was watching their children’s future shrink before their eyes.The dreams with which they had arrived in the city – of stability, dignity and a better life for their children – lay shattered in these testimonies. When even suffering could no longer secure hope, what remained was not only anger but grief: ab aur nahi saha jata, ab nahi hota (can’t take it anymore, just can’t).Taken together, our observations from the protest sites, footage posted by young workers and the ground reporting of independent YouTubers revealed a strikingly similar pattern across many locations. Workers assembled outside factory gates and demanded that management come out to address long-standing grievances: stagnant wages, opaque overtime calculations and payments, abusive treatment on the shop floor – especially of women workers – along with disputes over bonuses, weekly off and other dues.Yet at many sites, workers said, no one from management came forward to speak. Instead, managers reportedly slipped out through back entrances while workers remained outside for hours in the scorching heat, without food or water, waiting to be heard.A significant proportion of those gathered were women, many of them young workers in their twenties, standing in conditions that combined physical exhaustion with the humiliation of being refused even acknowledgement by their own managements.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. Read the next article in this series here.