Thu. Mar 28th, 2024

The Labour Ministry has recently drafted a social audit to check on whether the labourers enrolled under the worker welfare board are truly workers and to separate the non-workers from the rest. The audits are reportedly to begin in the states of Delhi and Rajasthan by the end of this week and are supposed to identify workers who are registered illegally.

The labour ministry has also issued a draft framework for the social audit under the Building and Other Construction Workers (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Services) Act. The initial projects in Delhi and Rajasthan are pilot projects which will be undertaken and depending on their success rate will the board further their initiatives to test it across the country.

“We will visit construction sites as well as the areas where workers live, to check how many of them are registered with the welfare boards. Do the children of the workers all have the scholarships they are entitled to? Those who have applied for various benefits — pension, maternity — how long do they have to wait? If you only get the maternity benefit when your child is two or three years old, what is the use?” says Subhash Bhatnagar.

The industry in India is supposed to employ around 5-7 crores of workers and is the nation’s second largest employer. However, the reason for the government to undertake such audits is that almost half of the workers who are carrying out work in this industry aren’t registered. Thus this project aims to find all the unregistered workers or the workers who are working with illegal permits and also to analyse why they haven’t registered yet.

Previously the Supreme Court had exerted that the BOCW will have no point in taking up any initiative without appropriate accountability and registration.

“All that we have been told is that there is more than 4.5 crore building and construction workers in the country and earlier about 2.15 crore had been registered and as of now about 2.8 crores have been registered. How these figures have been arrived at is anybody’s guess. In any event, the registration of building and construction workers is well below the required number and is also a guesstimate,” noted the judgment.

 

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