How Prepared is the State to Support Its Construction Workers?
Meerut:
The Union government has sent directives to all the state governments and union territory administrations to provide support to construction workers — those who sustain on daily wages and are at the very bottom of the economic strata. Even prior to the Centre’s directive, the Uttar Pradesh government had announced to pay Rs 1,000 per day to daily wagers. The Delhi government followed suit.
While it signals good intention, one ought to wonder how such transfers would be made and how effective is the state mechanism to carry out the exercise?
Each state and UT has a Building and Other Construction Workers (BOCW) Welfare Board that registers unorganised sector workers in the construction sector and offers them a range of benefits: health and life insurance; financial aid for marriage, pregnancy and motherhood; old age pension, etc. Workers registered with the board are issued an identity card, which is like a passbook of sorts that carries their identification and employment details. It is commonly called the “labour card”.
It is through these boards across the states that support measures will be provided to these daily wagers, but there are limitations.
The first and foremost is the rampant non-registration of workers with these boards. As per an activist who facilitates registrations, it is primarily because of lack of awareness and laxity among the workers.
“There is a lack of mobilisation among the workers. As long as they are not part of a trade union or an NGO working in this field, it is very hard to get their cards made and get them support, as they themselves lack awareness, and, at times, they don’t recognise the importance of registering with the board,” the activist told The Dispatch, requesting anonymity.
The activist added, “It’s very simple and practical reasoning: why would someone else go to the length of getting you registered if you don’t even join their union or NGO?”
It’s not that workers do not have protections independent of the board.
For the duration of the construction, the contractor is bound by law to provide for the worker’s housing and healthcare, but most contractors do not provide separate housing but arrange for makeshift homes from the construction material from the site itself.
They do this despite having included the costs for these arrangements in their project bids, Richard Sundharam, director of the non-governmental organisation Nirmana, told this writer earlier this month in a conversation for a different story on the construction sector.
Even with registrations and mobilisation, there remain riders in availing benefits from government boards.
Richard, whose organisation works for the welfare of the unorganised sector workers, said that it is difficult for a state board to keep track of workers as migrant laboureres often work across multiple states. Organisations have therefore campaigned for a pan-India card.
He said, “In 2018, after 12 years of filing a case by the National Campaign Committee for Construction Workers, which is a trade unions’ collective, the Supreme Court ruled for pan-India registrations, but the execution of the court order is still pending with the Director General of Labour Welfare at the Centre.”
There is another issue. A worker is supposed to work in a state for at least 90 days in a year to be eligible for the board’s benefits mentioned earlier in the story.
“The problem is that a lot of construction workers are migrant labourers, and they may not have 90 days of work in any single state as their work is scattered across many states, so they may not be eligible for benefit under any board despite working through the year,” Richard said.
This is why organisations have campaigned for a pan-India registration that extends its benefits pan-India, but the relief remains pending with the bureaucracy despite the apex court’s ruling.
The Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath formed a committee, chaired by the state finance minister, on 16 March, to come up with an estimate and modalities for transferring benefits to the workers. The report was submitted on the 20th and it was announced that the labour department will carry out the exercise, under which the BOCW Welfare Board comes. The number they gave was 35 lakhs.
While this looks promising, numbers do not add up.
As per UP BOCW Welfare Board’s website, there are 58,69,772 registration applications, out of which 55,17,315 have been approved, and 2,55,395 have not yet been approved.
The government, meanwhile, says it will provide benefits to 35 lakhs.
Considering the low level of awareness among the workers, it’s safe to believe that the actual number of eligible beneficiaries would be more than the applications with the government (over 58 lakhs) — which itself is way more than the number the government is targeting (35 lakhs).
Does this mean the efforts, initiated first by the UP government, and then adapted by other state governments and subsequently by the Centre, mean nothing? Certainly not. If not everyone, then certainly a large number of registered workers are going to receive benefits (assuming states will make timely transfers).
One plus-point is that the government does not need to pump additional funds for this exercise, as these state boards are funded from the cess that builders pay to the government, and are therefore independent of government’s funding.
The corpus with these boards stands today at Rs 31,000 crore for around 3.5 crore registered workers, the finance minister said while announcing a relief program for the poor.
The gap between the policy and practice has been visible all along. First, in the shape of the gap between number of beneficiaries and number of registered workers (due to unawareness or laxity), second, in government’s counting fewer beneficiaries than what their own records show (Uttar Pradesh’s case), and third, even if the policy is adapted in letter and spirit, there are enough riders — such as the 90-day requirement.
Hindi dailies in UP have reported that workers have not yet received bank transfers (by the time the story was written on 26 March) even when they are registered with the board. On 27th, it was reported that the government is carrying out surveys across the state to mark the beneficiaries beyond those who are already registered with the board.
James M Dorsey, a senior journalist and a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, recently wrote that pandemics offer us opportunities to rethink our political, economic, and social relations, and such a rethink is actually needed at the moment, but it remains stacked against the odds that much of the world will act reactively rather than proactively.
In India, leaders from across the spectrum have taken steps. In the BJP-ruled Uttar Pradesh, the AAP-ruled Delhi, and the Congress-ruled Punjab, the governments responded to the poor’s plight, and announced measures. The Centre too has been pro-poor until now. Despite being accused by the Congress for being the big corporates’ party, the Modi government’s relief program too, in the light of the coronavirus-induced shutdown, has been directed at the poor so far. This shows the intent across the spectrum.
But again, the gap between policy and practice, and intent and execution, define these measures at the moment. Will these measures work or will these measures get lost in bureaucratic lethargy and political rhetoric? Will bureaucratic lethargy kill the unified political intent? Only time will tell, sooner rather than later.
Madhur Sharma is a student of journalism at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi, and a graduate in history from the Delhi University. He tweets at @madhur_mrt.
Views expressed by the author in the article here are author’s own and are not bound to reflect those of the publication.
