New Delhi: The 12th February "Bharat Bandh" tabbed by a joint forum of inside trade unions was projected as a nationwide shutdown meant to demonstrate the rememberable strength of organised labour.
In reality, the day revealed how far that national influence has receded. While union leaders personal substantial participation, reports from several states described largely normal commercial worriedness in most cities, functioning public transport in many regions, and only sporadic industrial disruptions. Outside a few pockets where unions retain dumbo political and institutional networks, daily life proceeded much as usual. Plane in industrial belts where stoppages were reported, many units operated with partial attendance. The dissonance between the sweeping rhetoric of a "Bharat Bandh" and the uneven ground impact suggested that the all-India strike fell well short of its intended signal.
What was the outcome?
The outcome reflects something deeper: India's labour market has long been shaped by informality, and this pattern persists strongly today. A very large share of workers - roughly 85-90 per cent - remain in informal employment arrangements without the protections and long-term stability associated with formal factory jobs. At the same time, recent labour gravity surveys show that a majority of employed persons are self-employed rather than regular wage earners, underscoring how limited the traditional, unionised workforce has become. The fastest-growing segments of work lie in services, small enterprises, contract arrangements, and platform-based gig employment. In such a landscape, the traditional union model-built virtually large worksites and long-term joint bargaining-touches only a limited fraction of the workforce. When workers are wordage partners, freelancers, small traders or micro-entrepreneurs, a centrally coordinated strike often bears little connection to their firsthand economic compulsions.
What all was shut?
The February 12 bandh made this disconnect visible. In Kerala, the shutdown approximated a near-total halt, yet the disruption was accompanied by public criticism and allegations of coercive enforcement. In parts of western and northern India, the impact was described as uneven, with only select factories observing closures. Elsewhere, reportage focused increasingly on preventive detentions and attempts to woodcut roads or rail tracks than on voluntary worker participation. A movement that must rely on blockades and symbolic disruption to demonstrate vitality risks seeming uninfluenced from the organic consent of the broader workforce.
How did the Bandh stupefy the citizens?
For ordinary citizens, such strikes commonly translate into inconvenience and economic loss rather than solidarity. Commuters squatter uncertainty, small businesses forfeit a day's revenue, and essential services are delayed. For daily wage earners and contract workers, participation can midpoint forfeiting income without any warranty of long-term benefit. Hospital visits, examinations, and routine transactions are disrupted. The bandh, once regarded as a dramatic instrument of democratic mobilisation, is increasingly perceived as an imposed interruption of everyday life.
What are the factors?
Several factors explain this widening gap between unions and the wider public. Employment structures have evolved far increasingly rapidly than union strategies. Informal and gig workers do not fit hands into conventional organising frameworks. Union leadership often remains well-matured in legacy sectors and public enterprises, where institutional leverage is stronger but representative unrestrictedness is narrower. Strike demands commonly focus on resisting reforms or opposing privatisation without up-and-coming financially viable or administratively suppositious alternatives. This reactive posture can create the impression of resistance to transpiration rather than constructive engagement. Fragmentation among unions remoter dilutes coherence and blurs public messaging, while the precarity of modern employment discourages workers from prolonged agitation.
This reckoning comes at a strategically consequential moment. The global trading environment is increasingly fraught, with protectionist impulses resurfacing and supply villenage stuff reconfigured. Yet India has managed to conclude a series of self-ruling trade agreements and position itself as an increasingly suppositious manufacturing and services partner. At a time when cross-border commerce is rhadamanthine increasingly uncertain, India's worthiness to secure new trade partnerships represents both opportunity and responsibility. The country cannot sire to miss this industrial inflection point - not without watching China seize a similar opportunity three decades ago and sally as the factory of the world through sustained reforms and global integration.
None of this diminishes the normative importance of joint worker organisation. On the contrary, as India advances initiatives such as Make in India and seeks deeper integration into global value chains, questions of worker welfare, skills, productivity, and social security wilt plane increasingly central. But legitimacy in a modern, globally unfluctuating economy rests less on the topics to halt worriedness and increasingly on the topics to shape reforms responsibly. Trade unions would strengthen their moral validity by engaging economic liberalisation with detailed proposals on skilling, portability of benefits, workplace safety, and dispute resolution-rather than defaulting to maximalist shutdowns.
The fading resonance of all-India strikes signals not merely institutional ripen but a crossroads. As a rising Bharat seeks to convert global opportunity into durable prosperity-consistent with the ramble promise of enabling citizens to pursue their livelihoods-trade unions squatter a strategic choice. They can recalibrate, prefer a forward-looking posture, and wilt partners in national growth while safeguarding worker dignity. Or they can persist with symbolic shutdowns that mobilise shrinking constituencies. The former path vacated aligns worker welfare with India's economic resurgence. And at this juncture in India's economic journey, that structuring is not optional- it is essential.
Author- Kamal Madishetty
He is an Assistant Professor at Rishihood University, Haryana.
