— ✍️Vignesh M. & Dhanraj Jat

Dinesh Chouhan (name changed), a 34-year-old skilled migrant worker from Nawada, Bihar, earning ₹34,000 a month in a textile factory, built a life for his family over twenty years in Balotra, Rajasthan. Earning a stable wage, he paid ₹10,727 monthly towards a housing loan to realise his dream. On June 2, a single phone call ended it: his employer shut the factory, telling him to ‘go to your village.’ With zero savings, no social security, and pending wages, Chouhan was forced into daily-wage construction work for ₹500-600 a day. Stripped of his specialized indoor trade and exposed to a harsh environment as an unskilled helper, he had to stop after two days under the punishing 42-degree Celsius heat.

Chouhan’s physical breakdown mirrors a larger one: over a lakh of workers are caught in western Rajasthan’s industrial shutdown, after the Supreme Court and State Pollution Control Board ordered the abrupt closure of more than 1,400 factories across the textile and steel hubs of Jodhpur, Pali, and Balotra. For these mostly migrant workers from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the closures have triggered a humanitarian and economic crisis, exposing how environmental regulation, state apathy, and the disposability of informal labour intersect.

Union leaders say over 70% of migrant workers have already gone home or moved elsewhere, mostly single male migrants driven out by mounting living costs. Those who remain wait for wages that may never come, or hope factories reopen before rent and debt force them out too.

The closures are a systemic negligence finally catching up with the industry. For years, factory owners and Common Effluent Treatment Plant (CETP) operators bypassed treatment plants, discharging untreated effluent into the Jojari, Bandi, and Luni rivers. Oversight committees later found illegal four-kilometer pipelines buried beneath soil and bunds, unauthorized disposal of toxic sludge via tankers, and hazardous waste stockpiled inside the CETPs. The rivers turned black, groundwater was poisoned, and thousands of bighas of farmland turned sterile.

The Supreme Court’s intervention has finally forced the state to act. The push for clean rivers is ecologically vital, but the state’s blunt-force execution has pushed the cost onto the most vulnerable link in the chain: the workers.

When the factories shut, there were no formal notices, no transition plans, no safety nets. Workers across Jodhpur and Balotra report a total absence of Employee State Insurance or Provident Fund coverage, paid mostly in cash, off the books.

Mahesh Pande, 30, from Lakhimpur Kheri, Uttar Pradesh, is trapped by obligations. ‘We have a housing loan of ₹12,000 a month,’ he says. ‘My children are in LKG and first standard in a private school here. I have no money to pay the fees.’ His owner offered him a temporary role of security guard at the same factory for ₹15,000 a month, half the ₹30,000 he earned before. If the factory doesn’t reopen in the coming weeks, he’ll go home too.

Pande’s desperation echoes across the worker colonies. ‘What worries me most is not food. It is debt,’ Dinesh said. In Jodhpur, women in the steel and textile industries face predatory urban economics and sudden joblessness: earning ₹12,000 for 12-hour shifts, while landlords demand rent of ₹2,000 to ₹5,500, and microfinance lenders chase EMIs on housing and marriage loans they fear they can no longer repay.

Geopolitical tensions have pushed gas cylinder prices to ₹3,000 in the local black market, cutting into families’ food. The wage halt has also choked off the ₹2,000 to ₹5,000 monthly remittances workers send home to Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. What appears from the outside as an industrial shutdown is experienced by workers as a chain reaction affecting every aspect of household life, one that extends hundreds of kilometers beyond the closed factory gates.

Even the few sectors that might absorb these workers, like handicrafts, exploit the crisis: low pay, and reluctance to hire for fear workers return once textile and steel work resumes. The crisis also hits unevenly. Dagala Ram, 56, a local steel worker earning ₹25,000 a month, lost his job too, but has social security, zero debt, and a 10-bigha farm to fall back on, safety valves much of the migrant workers simply don’t have. Once wages stop, the effects show within days.

Workers are not opposed to the environmental action; their frustration is at how its costs are distributed. ‘The government didn’t think about the workers,’ said Vipin, 22, a migrant from Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, who earned ₹18,000 a month. ‘The irresponsible employers are responsible for this. We are paying for others’ mistakes,’ he adds.

Trade unions, including AITUC and the Masraij union in Balotra, have submitted memorandums demanding lay-off compensation and alternative employment. ‘The government failed to protect its most precarious workers from a crisis they did not create,’ said Hanuman Ram, AITUC’s Barmer general secretary.

Rajasthan offers a grim preview of the challenges awaiting India’s industrial corridors. While environmental justice is non-negotiable, it cannot be measured solely through compliance reports and treatment plants. It must account for the workers whose livelihoods collapse when long-delayed regulations finally arrive. The real question is not “clean rivers versus jobs,” but whether a green economy can be built without subsidizing transition costs through the starvation and displacement of informal labour.

Currently, moreover, environmental closures operate in a legal vacuum, treating workers as collateral damage. This must change: judicial and state interventions must legally and strictly intertwine environmental compliance while ensuring labour rights. The penalty for decades of regulatory failure and corporate greed belongs to the state and polluters, not to workers like Dinesh, breaking his back under the scorching heat, paying for a poisoned river he never ruined.

- Vignesh M and Dhanraj Jat work with migrant workers in the industrial towns of Western Rajasthan in association with Aajeevika Bureau.

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