Introduction
Baseline rights of workers in India have traditionally been
dealt with under numerous, often overlapping, labour laws and
overseen by multiple regulators. The approach has mostly been a
compliance (tick the box) exercise with hardly any emphasis on
businesses' accountability to improve labour conditions for a
large section of the workforce.
The Indian government is now in the process of consolidating 29
existing labour laws into four labour codes (the Codes). These
codes cover the critical rights of wages, social security,
industrial relations, and safety, health and working conditions of
workmen. The much-needed modernisation of labour laws is an
opportunity for the government and business to move away from a
prescriptive top-down approach to a more consultative and
sustainable effort to address the core issue of protecting human
rights of workmen. Further, their enforcement comes at a time when
companies are increasingly being judged on their
