Akash Bhattacharya

Climate and labour injustice in urban India are the product of the same framework of capitalist exploitation. Yet India’s law and policy approaches to the entangled issue of environmental and labour rights has consistently fallen short of clear committments.

With the aggravating effects of neoliberalism and Hindutva fascism, labour rights in India, which are a reflection of citizenship itself, have been systematically diluted through protective legislation, the criminalisation of protests and strikes, the informalisation of work, and attacks on unionisation - notably through the new labour codes.

Who are the residents, and who are the encroachers? Across informal settlements in India’s urban centres, ceaseless demolitions, combined with judicial complicity, have emerged as means of engineering working class populations out of the electoral process. In response, the affected have invoked their suffrage.