The centre has no quick program to give any monetary compensation to migrant workers heading to their native villages amid the lockdowns imposed in key urban centres to arrest the spike in Covid-19 circumstances. Even the new Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Code that governs inter-state migrant workers could not come to their help, as the relevant guidelines are but to be notified by the states.
Though small business and sector are but to face labour crunch, the exodus of workers from cities like Delhi and Mumbai have forced the government to sit back and take note.
The union labour secretary had a meeting with his state counterparts last week in which neither the states that provide migrant labourers or the ones which obtain such labour expressed any severe concern more than the existing predicament.
Meanwhile, the labour ministry revived 20 handle rooms it had set up across the nation in April last year to mitigate the difficulties of migrant workers. These handle rooms, monitored and supervised by the chief labour commissioner, had resolved grievances of lakhs of such workers last year by means of coordination with many state governments, the labour ministry stated in a statement on Tuesday.
Announcing the revival of the handle rooms on Tuesday, Labour secretary Apurva Chandra stated migrant workers are cost-free to get in touch by means of e-mail, mobile and WhatsApp with the officers manning these handle rooms for any type of assistance they demand. “Our officers will be there to help them,” Chandra stated in a video statement.
These handle rooms will also address wage-connected grievances of workers employed in the Central sphere like ports and mines.
Given that the OSH code could not be invoked to tackle the predicament, Rituparna Chakraborty, co-founder & executive vice-president, TeamLease Services, stated: “This pretty much tells us the need and urgency behind notifying and making the four labour codes implementable between the Centre and states.”
XLRI professor KR Shyam Sundar stated, “The non-implementation of the labour codes which the government claimed would provide universal benefits and cover migrant workers and informal workers far more comprehensively than the existing labour laws will surely hurt and deprive potential benefits and reliefs to millions of vulnerably placed migrant workers.”
The OSH code gives for an employer to provide an inter-state migrant worker annually to and fro journey allowance to his native location from the location of employment. States have been empowered to provide solution to such a worker for availing positive aspects of public distribution technique either in his native state or the location state exactly where he is employed.
The relevant provisions of the OSH Code are applicable to each establishment in which 10 or more inter-state migrant workers are employed or had been employed on any day of the preceding 12 months.
The labour ministry has not too long ago launched field work for conducting an all-India survey of migrant workers. It will also survey the households getting internal migrants with a particular concentrate on migrant workers and to recognize Covid-19’s effect on migrant workers.
During the nation-wide lockdown last year, a small more than 1.14 crore migrant workers returned to their property states even so, most of these migrant workers also returned to their workplaces and resumed productive employment, labour minister Santosh Kumar Gangwar stated in Lok Sabha on February 8 this year.
To increase employment and livelihood possibilities for migrant functions returning to villages in the wake of Covid-19 outbreak, the government had on July 20,2020, launched Garib Kalyan Rojgar Abhiyan in 25 districts to provide employment and build infrastructure in the rural places with a resource envelope of `50,000 crore. No such scheme has been announced by the government so far in the existing year.