CITU Delegation Visits V-Guard Employees' Protest in Uttarakhand; Stages Sit-in at Collectorate After District Collector Refuses to Meet

Rudrapur: A CITU delegation led by All India General Secretary Elamaram Kareem visited protesting V-Guard employees at Gandhi Park in Rudrapur, Udham Singh Nagar district, Uttarakhand, expressing solidarity with their ongoing struggle for fair wages. When the District Collector refused to meet the delegation for discussions, the leaders launched a sit-in protest at the Collectorate, continuing their demonstration for over three hours.

The Rudrapur plant is a major production centre for V-Guard Industries, manufacturing stabilisers, inverters, and PCBs. The company commands a 40 to 45 per cent share of India's voltage stabiliser market, yet thousands of contract workers at the plant — the majority of them young women — are paid a meagre ₹9,000 per month. There are no permanent staff at the plant. When workers demanded fair wage increases, they were met with police crackdown and eviction from the factory gates.

The Uttarakhand government has not revised minimum wages in the engineering industry since the state was formed in 2000, and has not even constituted a Minimum Wages State Advisory Board. While minimum wages were recently revised unilaterally for shops and establishments, the revision has not been extended to engineering industries or 57 other employment categories in the state.

The V-Guard struggle is part of a broader wave of worker protests sweeping Uttarakhand's industrial belt over the past week, with workers at Velrise, Tata Yazaki, Suprajeet, MMT, Spark Minda, and Bajaj Motors also raising their voices — several of whom have already won wage increases through their struggles. CITU said that despite police repression and government indifference, the fighting spirit of Uttarakhand's industrial workers has remained unbroken.