India’s labour landscape underwent its biggest reset since Independence on November 21, 2025 , when the government finally implemented the four labour codes. These codes, on wages, industrial relations, social security and occupational safety and health, replace 29 separate laws and bring India’s decades-old labour framework under one consolidated, modern system.

For a workforce that has expanded at a record pace in the past few years, the timing is striking. Between 2017–18 and 2023–24, India added over 16 crore jobs. Unemployment fell from 6% to 3.2%. More than 1.5 crore women entered the formal workforce. But this new economy was still being governed by rules written for a very old one.

The codes attempt to fix that mismatch by replacing a tangle of overlapping, outdated laws with a

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