The Silent Army
Imagine waking up to a still India. No one builds, drives, delivers, or cleans. The construction cranes stand frozen, kitchens lie cold, and the hum of the cities dissolves into silence. It isn’t war or disaster, just the disappearance of 450 million people who keep this country alive.
They are India’s invisible majority: the workers who build the towers, carry the bricks, mend the roads, deliver the meals. They are not on the margins. they are the core. Remove them, and the $3.7 trillion economy stops breathing.
Yet in the collective imagination of India’s progress, they do not exist. Why does a nation that prides itself on growth still choose to erase those who make it possible?
The Architecture of Amnesia
Nearly 90 percent of India’s workforce remains informal, without contracts, insurance, or recognition. They form the hidden scaffolding of modern India, holding up cities they will never inhabit and building wealth they will never share.
A construction worker collapses under the sun; there is no HR memo. A gig rider crashes after a fifteen-hour shift; the app moves on. They are called “partners” or “contractors,” euphemisms that disguise dependence as equality.
The facts are brutal. Eighty-one percent of India’s construction sites lack toilets, clean water, or shade. Informal workers earn less than half the wages of formal employees doing the same job. Barely 11.7 percent of gig workers have any form of safety cover. More than 155,000 Indian labourers die each year from work-related causes, deaths unregistered, unacknowledged, unpunished.
Exploitation here is not accidental; it is structural.
The Heat Writes the Obituaries
Climate change has turned work itself into a weapon. Delhi, Lucknow, and Jaipur now touch 47°C each summer. Cyclones have displaced 18 million people since 2020. Heat-related deaths have risen 34 percent since 2016.
The faces of this crisis are familiar: men laying asphalt that melts beneath their feet; women carrying bricks under a punishing sun; riders weaving through traffic to deliver cold coffee to air-conditioned homes.
“What becomes of those who sell their shadows to a burning sun,” asks a poet, “when even the policies meant for them never see daylight?”
Climate change is no longer an environmental crisis, it is a class war, fought in degrees Celsius. The poor die first, and they die quietly.
The Ritual of Empty Promises
India’s record of worker protection reads like a ledger of intentions without outcomes.
The Unorganised Workers’ Social Security Act (2008) promised inclusion but touches less than 12 percent of those it was meant to serve. The much-celebrated e-Shram portal enrolled 284 million workers, but only one in five has received any tangible benefit.
Meanwhile, countries often criticized for labour abuses have moved ahead. Qatar mandates rest breaks and shaded work zones. The UAE bans outdoor work during peak heat hours, with penalties reaching ₹2 lakh per violation. India has no comparable enforcement.
This isn’t reform; it’s choreography; a theatre of compassion where laws perform better than they live.
The Price of Neglect
Neglect is not only moral, it is economic.
The World Bank warns that by 2030, heat stress could cost India ₹15 lakh crore; about 5 percent of GDP, and erase 35 million jobs, mostly in the informal sector. Every rupee saved by ignoring safety today will cost ten in lost productivity tomorrow.
Cooling shelters, shaded rest zones, and climate-adaptive work hours aren’t luxuries. They are the minimal architecture of survival. Yet India’s progress remains built on the illusion that human life is infinitely replaceable.
The Uncounted Dead
The Lancet estimates 18,172 Indian workers have died from heat, exhaustion, or natural disasters in the past decade. The real figure is higher, because silence doesn’t make it to statistics.
Each was a story, a family, a possibility. A man who dreamed of sending his daughter to school; a woman who saved for a fan she would never use. They vanish not into history but into administrative voids.
India does not just lose workers, it loses memory.
The Moral Equation
There can be no Atmanirbhar Bharat if those who build it remain disposable. No Sabka Vikas when the Sabka die uncounted.
The crisis India faces is not one of policy, but of principle. Growth built on the erasure of its own makers cannot endure. To build a humane future, India must first acknowledge its invisible present.
That means enforcing labour laws with climate awareness, mandating corporate accountability with criminal consequence, and treating informal workers not as beneficiaries but as citizens, stakeholders in the nation they sustain.
The Question India Cannot Escape
If 450 million Indians labour unseen, what does that make the rest of us, witnesses or beneficiaries of their invisibility?
They do not seek pity. They seek recognition. They do not want applause. They want a fair chance to live, to rest, to return home alive.
Every highway, every glass tower, every doorstep delivery is a reminder that India’s progress runs on borrowed time and borrowed lives.
The poet Faiz once wrote, “We who were not counted, shall be counted yet.”
Perhaps the true measure of India’s greatness will not be its GDP, its skyscrapers, or its satellites, but the day it stops counting growth and starts counting lives.
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Very well written.
thank you sir !
Insightful and extremely relevant issue needing immediate remedial steps on ground which become visible. Highly appreciate Dear Ashish highlight an issue we as conscious citizens observe but ignore, invariably.