Unemployment
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--- Please click here to access the Standing Committee Report on Labour: Social Security and Welfare Measures for Inter-State Migrant Workers (2020-21), Sixteenth Report, presented to the Lok Sabha on 11th February, 2021 and laid in the Rajya Sabha on 11th February, 2021, Seventeenth Lok Sabha, Lok Sabha Secretariat, Ministry of Labour and Employment. The current pandemic has forced the Government to give a serious thought to the plight of the migrant workers, given the scale of the unprecedented misery millions of them found themselves in during the crisis. Accordingly, the Government of India through its various organs formulated certain new schemes and aligned certain other schemes already in existence to mitigate the hardships of the migrant workers caused due to the pandemic and the consequential lockdown. Such schemes inter-alia include Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Rojgar Abhiyan, Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojna, Atmanirbhar Bharat Scheme, Affordable Rental Housing complexes, Ayushman Bharat -Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana, etc. Deeply anguished at the pathetic plight of the migrant labours during the crisis and with a view to assessing the efficacy of various Schemes launched/ aligned to alleviate the conditions of such workers, the Committee took up the subject for examination and report. In the process, the Committee took oral evidence of the Ministries of Labour & Employment, Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution (Departments of Consumer Affairs and Food and Public Distribution), Health and Family Welfare, Housing and Urban Affairs, Rural Development, and Skill Development & Entrepreneurship besides obtaining Background Information and written clarifications from these Ministries/ Departments. Based on these oral and written depositions, the Committee have broached upon the subject in great details as enumerated in the succeeding chapters. According to the Parliamentary Standing Committee report, there is no better scheme than the MGNREGS to provide sustainable livelihood to the unskilled workers, including the inter-state migrant labours. In fact, by enacting the MGNREGA legislation in 2005, the Indian Parliament had set in motion a process that provides for a specific and significant welfare provision, constitutive of the very idea of citizenship. As socio-economic rights, including the right to work, have long been part of the Directive Principles of State Policy, the Committee trust that the Ministry must have provided adequate opportunity for wage employment for the unskilled workers, especially the migrant workers in the 262 permissible works under MGNREGA. The Committee report has advised that the Ministry should unfailingly continue with their endeavour in the provision of wage employment to the unskilled/ migrant workers not only during pandemics but for all times, to meet any contingency and cater to the basic needs of the poorer sections of the society. |
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