Disturbance

Court asks as to why Government should not pay for bandhs and strikes that cause losses

In the recent pasts, the northern states of India have seen agitations and strikes that have caused a huge amount of inconvenience to the general population. The protests by Gujjars, and then by the Jat community, demanding reservations in jobs have seen blockades of roads and trains, stopping the flow of goods and people across many states and national highways. For example, the Jat agitation centered on putting pressure on the Government in Delhi and blocked many of the highways around the national capital, and the protesters squatted on train tracks, preventing movement of trains for many days. And given the political strength of the community and its importance as a vote bank, no Government dared to take any drastic action to ensure that the agitation did not result in inconvenience. Calling rallies and protesting for getting reservation is fine, but stopping the flow of goods and people amounts to acting against the economic interests of the country. The responsibility of the State and the Central Government is to ensure that such acts do not impede the rights of people, but they failed miserably as usual.
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The mess in Kashmir, and the Government being ineffective in doing anything to counter it

The current mess in Kashmir offers no easy option for the Government in terms of how to handle the situation, and bring the overall situation to the peace that was there just a few months ago. After a long period of time, the Indian Government was feeling happy about the situation in Kashmir. Tourists were arriving in droves, the local economy was working fine, security incidents were minimum in terms of attacks by terrorists (and the casualties in terms of deaths in violent incidents as well as in cross-fire between the security forces and the terrorists was at a minimum). Further, in the overall situation, the tolerance for using terrorism as a method of furthering their goals had gone out of style, and as a result, support structure and media support for the terrorist movement in Kashmir had been drastically reduced, giving the Government a big plus. Also, local elections had been held and there was enough participation by the local electorate that a claim of electoral boycott could not be sustained.
And then, everything turned upside down. There seems to have been a new strategy in place to bring the status of Kashmir back to a boil, using the weapon a public protest. Public protests can be very difficult to handle, since you are no longer dealing with terrorists whom you can attack with the full force of security weapons, and without too many political issues. In this case, the Government is dealing with normal citizens, with young men, with women, and with many others. They pelt stones at the security forces, target individual policemen, try to burn and destroy Government institutions, and in a case of what one would think to be suicidal actions, they target the barracks and the posts of the security services. And as a result, even though the state Government has tried to restrain the security forces from harsh action, the direct attacks on the security forces have resulted in firing.
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Industrial agitations affecting the business sustainability of a location

For quite some time now, the location of the Gurgaon – Manesar belt was the area that was promoted as a automobile and components cluster. So you have bigger manufacturers such as Maruti, other manufacturers, and a huge number of automobile components maker. However, in the past couple of years, there has been a number of union problem, labour agitations, etc, that is threatening the viability of this zone. There are a host of reasons for this – in some cases, there are genuine reasons where the workers feel that they are under-paid (and Maruti very rarely sees industrial actions since it pays its workers much more than other companies, and also because it employees a lot more engineers than other companies).; however in other cases, this is more because the workers are provoked by some of the major unions to unionize and fight for more right.
One result of this increased industrial activity is the risk element, and with more strikes and shutdowns in the region, the region has lost some of its attractions. Companies that have tightened their belts over the past economic slowdown no longer have the excess capacity to make up for lost production, and need to move to other regions in order to diversify their risks. If more companies perceive this region to be a risky region industrially, and if there are more law and order problems between company management and workers, then there will be a movement out of the region (link to article).

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