India built parks for capital. It never built them for labour.

Walk into any industrial park in India and you can see exactly who it was built for.

Capital gets a four-lane approach road. It gets a dedicated feeder, often its own substation, power that does not blink during a production run. It gets a single-window clearance that collapses forty approvals into one desk. It gets land at a subsidised rate, a ten-year tax view, and an officer whose job is to make the investment land. Every one of these is infrastructure, paid for ahead of demand, on the bet that the factory will come. The bet usually pays. The factory comes.

The workforce that fills the park gets nothing

Then look at the people who walk into that factory at six in the morning. They got none of it.

No road was built to the place they sleep, because no one planned where they would sleep. There is no single window for a worker. He clears his own forty approvals, one broker at a time. There is no subsidised land for his bed, so he pays a deposit to a man who owns a converted house with six to a room. There is no reliable power where he lives, no clearance, no officer whose job is to make his arrival land. The park solved the factory's first day in extraordinary detail. It left the worker's first day to the informal market, which prices it at exactly what a desperate person will pay.

This is not an oversight. An oversight is a missing footpath. This is the deliberate provisioning of one side of the park and the deliberate abandonment of the other. We built the half that attracts capital and skipped the half that holds the workforce. It is a policy choice, and it has been made the same way in every park I have stood in.

The missing half of the park

The gap shows up in a number every plant manager knows. Workers arrive, and within the first month roughly half are gone. The line never stabilises. The factory that got its single-window clearance cannot keep the people the clearance was meant to attract, because the infrastructure stops at the gate.

The country that solves the second half wins the first. Factories attract capital. The place a worker returns to after the shift is what holds the workforce that makes the capital productive. Solve that, and the line stabilises, the attrition curve flattens, and the park finally works for the reason it was built.

So we build the missing half. Managed living within walking distance of the gate. A bed on day one, a verified identity, meals now that cooking is banned in the rooms for fire safety, a job he can keep, and a layer underneath all of it that follows him when the employer changes. This is not housing. It is labour infrastructure that happens to have a roof. It is the second window the park forgot to open.

India is very good at building parks for capital. It has built them for forty years and it builds them well. It has never once built the same thing for the people who fill them. That is the half we are building, and it is the half that decides whether the other half holds.