Abstract
A growing literature examines the relationship between India’s supposedly ‘restrictive’ labour laws and poor performance on a range of industrial and social indicators. After summarizing the main claims of this literature, I show that multiple errors were made in constructing indices to measure inter-state differences in labour regulation. These indices were misinterpreted as measures of labour market flexibility. I then highlight some econometric problems in this literature, and the difficulties involved in replicating the analysis with corrected and updated indices. I conclude by summarizing evidence of deteriorating labour market outcomes for workers in Indian industry, without any changes in the regulatory framework.