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The Ministry of Labour & Employment is considering starting a central scheme to track the movement of migrant workers in the country to help the government to target their social security benefits better and revise the allocation to states based on updated data. The move will benefit migrant workers, who will be monitored through a national coordination system to be built by the Centre and the states. At a meeting between labour ministry officials and all states in January, it was decided that the government will prepare the scheme, which will have a national coordination system, a national multilingual call centre to provide guidance for unorganised and migrant workers and bonded labourers and a national IT system where the registration details of migrant workers can be entered by the source and destination states, a senior government official told ET. As of now, the government has no records about the movement of migrant labourers. As a result, states continue to receive central allocations based on census estimates, without any data on how many workers have moved from one state to another. The ministry is evaluating a scheme that will include a tripartite agreement between the source state, the destination state and the Centre to update the records of migrant workers through the national IT system. ‘This will ensure that they continue availing of the government's social security benefits, irrespective of their movement between different states,’ the official added. There were an estimated 309 million internal migrants, or 30% of the population, according to a 2011 Unicef paper, which cited Census 2001 data. More recent estimates (NSSO 2007-2008) put the figure at 326 million, the UN agency said. Migrants are mostly employed in construction, domestic work, textile, brickkilns, transportation, mines, quarries and agriculture, Unicef said. Migrant workers are covered under the Inter-State Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act, 1979. The act allows contractors and establishments to avail of onsite services of interstate workers to overcome only the temporary shortage of required skilled workers in a state. However, since the stipulations of the act are not implemented in true spirit by the state governments and there is no mechanism to track their movement, it is feared many interstate workers are deprived of their basic dues, including their minimum wages.
Keywords
government, scheme,migrant workers, migration, Inter-State Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act 1979, Ministry of Labour & Employment, social security
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