Crisis Communication in India's Manufacturing Sector: A Multi-Case Analysis of Stakeholder Trust, Transparency, and Institutional Constraints (2023-2025)

India's manufacturing sector has witnessed a series of industrial crises between 2023 and 2025. These events offer an important context for examining how organisations communicate with stakeholders during emergencies. This paper analyses six case studies: the Sigachi Industries explosion (2025), the Escientia Advanced Sciences blast (2024), the Amudan Chemicals explosion (2024), a boiler explosion in Haryana's automotive sector (2024), the Glenmark Pharmaceuticals product recalls (2024–2025), and the Maiden Pharmaceuticals contamination crisis (2022–2024). Together, these cases provide a basis for understanding organisational communication practices in high-risk manufacturing contexts. Drawing on framing theory, stakeholder theory, and Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT), the study identifies three recurring patterns across all six cases. First, organisations often delayed the disclosure of crisis-related information, frequently beyond what is considered international best practice. Second, communication tended to follow a hierarchical structure, with investors receiving priority over workers, despite the latter having strong legitimacy claims. Third, in the absence of timely organisational communication, regulatory bodies and other external actors played a significant role in shaping early narratives around the crisis. Building on these observations, the paper introduces the concept of a "communication vacuum." This refers to the period immediately after a crisis when organisational communication is limited or absent, allowing external actors such as the media, regulators, and worker groups to define the initial interpretation of events. In the cases examined, this vacuum typically extended beyond 12 hours after the incident. During this time, alternative narratives were established and often continued to influence public understanding even after organisations began to respond. The study is based on a qualitative analysis of more than 110 documents, including corporate statements, regulatory filings, media reports, and stakeholder accounts. The findings suggest that crisis communication practices in India's manufacturing sector differ in important ways from global benchmarks. These differences appear to be shaped by institutional factors, including limited regulatory capacity, a fragmented media environment that enables selective disclosure, and relatively weak labour organisation, which constrains collective worker voice. This paper makes three contributions to the literature on crisis communication. It documents consistent patterns of communication practice in a context that has received limited scholarly attention. It develops the concept of the communication vacuum as a tool for analysing the early stages of crises where external actors dominate narrative formation. It also extends established frameworks such as SCCT, stakeholder theory, and framing analysis by situating them within institutional environments where organisations do not fully control the narrative. Overall, the findings suggest that crisis communication in emerging economy manufacturing contexts must be understood in relation to institutional realities, rather than through universal models alone.