Daily Briefing: New labour codes enter implementation tunnel

🚨 Big Story

The Centre’s decision to finally operationalise all four labour codes, five years after Parliament cleared them, marks the most sweeping reset of India’s labour framework since Independence, collapsing 29 Central laws into a new architecture. This promises wider social security, a national floor wage, portability of benefits through Aadhaar-linked UAN, and even accident compensation for commuters. But the rollout has arrived with political faultlines: while PM Modi called the codes “comprehensive and progressive”, trade unions slammed the move as “unilateral” and “anti-worker”, pointing to contentious provisions on fixed-term employment, retrenchment norms and curtailed strike rights. With draft rules set to be published within a week and some industry-facing provisions likely to kick in by April 2026, the reform now enters an implementation tunnel. 

Zoom in: The labour laws overhaul gives firms more hiring flexibility under the Industrial Relations Code, while extending gratuity to workers after just one year of service, a shift the government balanced with secrecy to avoid the kind of backlash that hit the farm laws. The push comes as investment sentiment remains muted and global protectionism rises. But with several states still lagging with framing their rules, and some moving independently on issues like gig-worker welfare, the challenge lies in demonstrating political conviction by communicating the importance of the reform and ensuring stakeholders come on board. 

In our Opinion section today, Manish Sabharwal writes that Bihar’s real jobs crisis isn’t unemployment but “employed poverty” and that the newly notified labour codes could finally shift backward states from migration to meaningful job creation. 

⚡ Only in Express

The case collapse: We trace the unravelling of the Nithari case through the story of Surender Koli, a man branded for nearly two decades as the “cannibal” of Noida. Koli now walks free after the Supreme Court declared the investigation against him “botched” and a “manifest miscarriage of justice.” From the leaked confession recorded after 60 days of continuous police custody, midnight interventions that halted his hanging hours before execution, to a High Court that finally dismantled the prosecution’s case, this account lays bare how Koli survived 13 death sentences. His defence team calls it a cautionary tale of how “evidence which would have been rejected by a law student” was accepted by court after court. Read here.

💡 Express Explained

India’s farm export surge–USD 25.9 billion in six months, far outpacing the country’s total goods export–comes with crosscurrents. Non-basmati rice, buffalo meat, marine products and coffee are powering the rise, helped by relaxed curbs and firm global demand, even as Trump-era US food tariffs begin to reshape export routes. But underneath the buoyancy lie vulnerabilities: price swings, government intervention, and an import basket still tethered to vegetable oils, pulses and fruits. As New Delhi weighs a possible trade thaw with Washington, find out what this may mean for the next export cycle.

✍️ Express Opinion

“The Supreme Court’s advisory opinion on the President’s Special Reference no. 1 of 2025, which reinterprets the scope of gubernatorial powers under Article 200, is an obligingly ambiguous piece of judgment that risks subverting representative government through seemingly technical reasoning,” writes Pratap Banu Mehta, our contributing editor. By discarding the timelines set out in the Tamil Nadu ruling and elevating an undefined “elasticity” in gubernatorial discretion, the Court, he writes, “has endorsed a structure where the governor’s refusal to act… amounts, in practice, to a constitutional veto without accountability.”  And while the bench claims it may step in through “limited directions,” he argues this only expands judicial power, fuels more litigation, and leaves states in a vacuum where “law is infinite elasticity with the central government pulling all the strings.”

🎬 Web Series Review

Measuring up?: The Family Man Season 3 returns to Nagaland with a bang: serial blasts, a wobbly ‘Project Sahakar’, and Srikant (Manoj Bajpayee) thrown into a spiralling crisis, and then slackens and peters out as it goes along, writes Shubhra Gupta in her review. Despite the gorgeous North Eastern canvas and a strong cast, the season’s “frantic yet obvious” writing, with lashings of filmi lines, makes it lose steam fast. With Samantha Ruth Prabhu’s steely presence missing, Gupta writes, “I thoroughly enjoyed Season 2 and had high hopes for Season 3, but after a point, this one ultimately doesn’t cut it.”

That’s it for today, have a great weekend!

Malavika Jayadeep

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