ILPC 2026

Industrial restructuring in India over recent decades has involved significant realignment in the geography of production as well as transformation in the labour process and work organisations. Ongoing debates on industrial development around the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) and the Golden Quadrilateral projects highlight linkages between industry, finance and logistics, as well as their interplay with the state. What is less emphasised is that these corridor projects involve industrial areas with different patterns of labour deployment, control and relations of production. Drawing on fieldwork in regions of India with contrasting patterns of accumulation, and with particular emphasis on Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai, the three key industrial zones in the corridor projects, the paper examines the trajectories of industrial restructuring and the responses by labour movements over the past two decades. It is hypothesised that diverse manifestations of the industrial restructuring process give rise to different evolution of labour (control) regimes, which in turn shape opportunities and constraints on labour’s capacity to organise itself in specific ways, leading to possibilities and spaces for new forms of labour organisations and activism to emerge.