"India’s labour reforms trying what Bangladesh, China, Vietnam did — swap income for security", 11 May 2020

In response to India’s deteriorating macroeconomic situation, at least three state governments in the country have issued a slew of provisional legislative changes to their labour laws amid possibilities that more states would follow. For instance, to revive industrial growth, which is suffering in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, BJP governments...in Uttar Pradesh and...Gujarat have promulgated an ordinance to suspend 38 labour laws for industries for the next three years... 

State governments — mainly belonging to the labour exporting, low-income parts of the Hindi heartland — are responding to a long-held desire to see reforms in India’s abstruse and restrictive labour laws. Faced with large additions to their workforce each year, and the lack of a commensurate provision of jobs in the formal economy, they have been left frustrated by the Centre’s inability to streamline India’s approximately 200 labour laws for the states along with several national labour laws.

Labour market deregulation has created jobs and economic opportunities for labourers — effectively offsetting the precarity created by the lowering of legislative safeguards...

However, in China, Vietnam and Bangladesh, legislative means were used to achieve reformist ends. In these states, even as safeguards for labourers were reasonably lowered, certain legal provisions — concerning minimum wages for example — were retained to limit the compromise of worker’s rights.