On 24 April 1890, more than 10,000 mill workers filled the Race Course Ground at Mahalaxmi in Bombay to ask for something most Indians now take for granted, a weekly day of rest. 

Narayan Meghaji Lokhande, a mill storekeeper turned organiser, had called the gathering after mill owners decided to shut the mills two days every week, and many women workers also addressed the crowd. 

Mill owners accepted a Sunday holiday on 10 June, 1890, and that year the Government of India included Lokhande as an associate member of its Factory Labour Commission.

Born in 1848 in Thane, Lokhande worked for the railways and the postal department before he joined the Mandavi Textile Mills as a storekeeper in 1870. 

Life on the mill floor exposed him to punishing working hours and miserable living conditions, and that experience prompted him to organise the mill hands into an association that pressed their grievances.

How a rest day became a retirement question

Lokhande's campaign concerned rest rather than retirement, yet it began a long argument about what employers and the state owed the people who ran India's factories, and that argument moved slowly. 

The first Provident Fund Act arrived in 1925, but it regulated the funds of only some private concerns, so its reach stayed limited. In 1929, the Royal Commission on Labour stressed the need for provident funds for industrial workers, and the Indian Labour Conference of 1948 agreed that a statutory scheme for industrial workers could be introduced.

To test the idea in a restricted field, the government launched the Coal Mines Provident Fund........

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