A parliamentary panel is considering proposals to widen the health care and gratuity coverage for workers, a move that may potentially benefit millions of contract workers and other employees.
The parliamentary standing committee on finance, led by Biju Janata Dal MP Bhartruhari Mahtab, is considering a few options to push a wider Employees’ State Insurance (ESI) network for India’s workforce.
The current law states that any factory or company with more than 10 employees who earn a salary of up to ₹21,000 must register with the Employees’ State Insurance Corporation and provide health benefits to those employees.
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“We are considering options including raising the monthly wage ceiling from ₹21,000 to ₹32,000 to allow more employees avail the health care benefits,” Mahtab said. “The other proposal is to make it optional for workers who are earning higher wages.”
Contract workers and daily wage earners are focus areas for the central government and it has already implemented a series of measures for their benefits. With unorganized workers constituting 93% India’s workforce, the government has launched insurance and pension schemes, an e-shram portal for registration of workers and revamped retrenchment benefits, among other things.
To be sure, the parliamentary committee’s suggestions are not binding, but the panel is hopeful as a large number of its suggestions so far have been accepted by the government.
{{/usCountry}}To be sure, the parliamentary committee’s suggestions are not binding, but the panel is hopeful as a large number of its suggestions so far have been accepted by the government.
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One of the measures suggested by the panel has brought down the minimum term for gratuity entitlement for contract workers to one year instead of five. “But we are discussing some problems for contractual workers. If they get shifted to a new workplace after working for a few months, their contractors often refuse to count the previous service. Also, if contractors are replaced midway, it leads to similar problems,” said Mahtab.
The panel will meet the states and other stakeholders before submitting its report in the winter session of Parliament.
One of the key interventions of the panel in the recent months had been to suggest registration of migrant workers, as the panel observed there are no other identification process for such workforce and a registration would go a long way for targeted delivery of benefits as well. The government rolled out a new registration system based on the panel’s suggestion.