Several rights-based laws passed recently in Rajasthan have received nation-wide attention. While most are well-intentioned and progressive, some may call for improvement.
The Minimum Income Guarantee Bill passed in July, 2023 gives the right to 125 days of employment to those who can work. Those unable to work have been ensured a pension.
Rajasthan is the first state in the country to bring a law that has an enhanced entitlement of 25 days for work under MGNREGA at its own cost. While many states have urban employment guarantee schemes, Rajasthan is the first state in the country to provide a legal entitlement of 125 days of work under an urban employment programme as well.
Employment guarantee and income guarantee
With the passage of the Minimum Income Guarantee Bill, the Rajasthan government has made an attempt to tackle the country’s unemployment crisis. The bill emphasises that providing employment with decent wages to all who seek work should be the means of ensuring minimum income. This is important especially since there is so much work that needs to be done in the country for which lack of funds is always given as an excuse. The gap in India’s vast, idle workforce and the amount of work needed to be done in the country was first pointed out by Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal in the 1960s.
Empowering women with employment
Consider the situation of women. Their work participation rates are declining but their burden of unpaid family labour is rising.
Hence, there is the demand to convert unpaid care work of women in the household to paid work – providing elderly care, child care and care of the physically challenged – through self-help groups of women. This would be a better way of giving them economic independence and thus empowering them.
Ensuring genuine development
Employment for both men and women could also be in terms of ensuring ecological sustainability through afforestation, rainwater harvesting, lake desilting, etc.; providing social infrastructure in terms of decent anganwadis, schools, primary healthcare centres, low-income social housing, etc., which are being neglected right now due to the penchant for airports, bullet trains, expressways, and so on as the markers of ‘development’. All the above-mentioned works for empowering women, for ecological sustainability and required social infrastructure can be accommodated within Rajasthan’s employment guarantee provisions leading to genuine development.
Right to work for every adult
Notably, the Rajasthan Act says that the Right to Work under the Income Guarantee Act is for ‘every adult’ and not for only one person per household as in the MGNREGA. This is a remarkable change indeed if the necessary resources for this have been truly estimated and ensured. The passage of the Bill is a historic fulfilment of many of the demands that the citizens’ movements – the Right to Work Campaign, Pension Parishad and the Soochna Evum Rozgar Adhikar Abhiyan – have been advocating for over the past two decades.
Minimum pension to those unable to work
Since the formation of the Pension Parishad in 2009, it has been campaigning through continual dharnas (sit-ins) for a legal entitlement for pension that is universal, indexed to inflation and amounting to half the minimum wage. The indifference of the Union government to the plight of the elderly and these demands from citizens’ groups has been evident with the allocation to the National Social Assistance Programme being limited to Rs 200 per month for BPL families since 2007.
The Rajasthan Minimum Income Guarantee Act makes Rajasthan the first state to guarantee by law a minimum pension, which also doubles the minimum pension to Rs 1,000 per month, for all eligible elderly, widowed and disabled, with a guaranteed annual increment of 15% per year. These provisions of Rajasthan’s new law have given effect to the decades-long demand of the people’s campaign: “Har haath ko kaam do, kaam ka poora daam do; budhaape me aaram do, pension aur samman do” (guarantee employment for everyone, ensure minimum wage for those employed and ensure well-being of the elderly after retirement through pension)
However, contrary to the claim of the Pension Parishad that ‘universal’ pension to all elderly, widowed and disabled is being guaranteed by Rajasthan’s law, the recently passed legislation says that pension to the elderly will be paid to only ‘eligible persons’ and not universally. The eligibility criteria are still to be detailed.
Securing universal pensions
It needs to be noted that, as far as ‘universal’ pensions are concerned, all developed welfare states achieve that by combining tax-based social assistance to those who cannot contribute towards their pensions (as in the law passed by Rajasthan), with compulsory contributions, by workers who are able to pay during their working years, and by employers and the government. Nowhere is ‘universal’ pension to cover all elderly ensured without any contributions from workers, employers and the government towards it. Any attempt at ‘universalising’ pensions without ensuring some contributions would make it unsustainable in the long run.
Unorganised workers
It needs to be recalled that the Unorganised Workers’ Social Security (UWSS) Act of 2008 was supposed to find a way of providing ‘universal’ social security benefits to every unorganised worker. But it has fallen by the wayside after more than a decade as it did not clarify within the law what social security benefits it would guarantee, what their quantum would be, how the resources for it would be sourced from workers, employers and government, how it would be delivered and who would be exempted from contributions. The UWSS Act has now been replaced by the Social Security Code of 2020 which is yet to be notified for implementation as states are still framing the rules under it. But this Code too has repeated all the above failings of the UWSS Act as far as unorganised workers are concerned.
ILO Convention 102 on Social Security
Curiously, the campaigns in Rajasthan for social security have been limited to demanding ‘universal’ pension and have overlooked the eight other social security benefits like medical care and sickness, unemployment, employment injury, family, maternity, invalidity and survivors’ benefits as per ILO Convention 102. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention 102 sets out minimum standards for the level of social security benefits and the conditions under which they are to be granted.
In a partial fulfilment of the above necessity of having total social security, the Rajasthan Assembly has also passed the sector-specific Rajasthan Platform-Based Gig Workers (Registration and Welfare) Act, 2023, which makes it the first state in the country to pass a legislation ensuring social security to platform-based gig workers. The key provisions of the Act include: setting up of a tripartite board with the representation of aggregators, workers’ organisations and government with the powers to register platform-based gig workers in the state, notify and administer social security schemes for them, and monitor the implementation of the Act. It also introduces a dedicated welfare cess fee on each bill generated by the aggregator to the customer. The fee collected from individual transactions will be credited to a social security fund which would be used towards financing schemes meant for the welfare of platform-based gig workers. This proposed mechanism in the gig-workers’ Act has drawn inspiration from the Maharashtra Mathadi Hamal and other Manual Workers Act, the Building and other Construction Workers Welfare Act and others.
However, the Rajasthan Act is not the only law to recognise the needs of gig workers. The Social Security Code passed by the Union government in 2020 too recognises gig workers including platform workers. It has provided for a Board and similar mechanisms for registering all workers and aggregators, framing of social security schemes, establishing a social security fund and imposing an obligation on the gig employers to contribute 1-2% of their annual turnover into the Fund, to be used for carrying out the schemes.
The Soochna Evam Rozgar Abhiyan, which has been involved with the advocacy and drafting of the Rajasthan gig-workers’ Bill, recommends enacting similar ‘sector-specific Boards’ for ensuring ‘specific rights and schemes’ for all unorganised workers in rural and urban areas.
This will mean that workers of specific sectors will get varied and piecemeal benefits under various boards and not universal coverage or uniform benefits, which is a problem with the several already existing schemes. One wonders how many sector-specific boards will be required to cover all unorganised sector workers who constitute 93% of the labour force and what the administrative cost of such a measure would be. The Mathadi workers’ board for instance is catering to about one lakh workers only. One needs to note that Kerala, which has around 12 such Boards, has been restructuring them to avoid duplications in membership and provide standard benefits to all members. It is being admitted that the huge establishment costs of multiple boards are a problem in Kerala.
To avoid the hazards of having a multiplicity of boards, the second National Commission on Labour (NCL) suggested astutely that “area-based schemes appear to be eminently suitable for application to the workers in the unorganised sector, who are too numerous to be covered under occupation-based schemes”.
An earlier and better version of the SSC too had said, “…Infrastructure of local bodies (i.e. panchayats and municipal bodies) can be used for providing registration of both workers and entities, grievance redressal services …. and in administration of the social security system”. The ILO too had recommended an area-based approach rather than a sector-specific approach for providing social security to unorganised workers.
Shifting sectors of unorganised workers
Another reason for abjuring sector-specific boards would be because unorganised workers often shift from one sector to another. Agriculture workers from rural areas often transmute into construction workers in urban areas when seasonal farm work ends. Restrictions – such as the one specifying that a worker should have worked for a minimum of 90 days to be registered and obtain benefits under the Building & Other Construction Workers’ Welfare Board – often act as a hindrance to the worker being eligible under any Board.
Making coverage universal
The question is why these measures are being introduced in piecemeal fashion covering particular sectors of employment and for certain rights only and not being extended to cover all unorganised workers and all nine benefits to ‘universalise’ social security.
The National Advisory Council during the UPA’s tenure had suggested clear and unambiguous exclusion criteria for ensuring universal coverage of unorganised workers for social security.
Only two categories of workers were to be excluded: (i) workers already covered by the existing PF and ESIC schemes; and (ii) self-employed and other workers who pay income tax and are relatively better-off. All others were to be covered, without restrictions on sectors, limits on wages and number of workers in an establishment, etc.
A provision stating that certain employers may pay as their contribution a percentage of their annual turnover, or a percentage of the wages paid by them in a year to their unorganised workers, and file returns annually should have been the mode prescribed for all informal/unorganised sector employers.
The Madhya Pradesh Unorganised Workers Welfare (MP) Act of 2003 mandates all registered employers to pay 5% of the wages paid by them to their unorganised workers, however, on a monthly basis.
Government’s contribution through cess
The MP Act also mandates cesses on various state-level taxes and royalties to provide the government’s contribution to the single Social Security Fund (SSF): an additional duty on transfer of property; additional tax on certain motor vehicles; a welfare cess on sale or supply of forest produce; royalty on certain minor minerals; welfare cess on notified agricultural produce. This was also a recommendation of CIVIC in an alternative Bill for unorganised workers’ social security that it had prepared through a consultative process.
Single social security authority and fund
An earlier version of the Social Security Code by the Union government had attempted to rationalise all separate schemes, laws and boards and come up with a single Social Security Authority at the Union government level with state-level Boards and a single SSF. This was the format suggested even by the Labour Law Association, a non-governmental independent body. However, the latest SS Code version fails in this. The Arjun Sengupta Commission had recommended just two Boards, one for wage-workers and one for the self-employed. The Madhya Pradesh Act has also formed just two Boards: one for rural and one for urban areas.
Hopefully, a citizens’ movement will be taken up to include a means of securing compulsory contributions to fund social security for unorganised workers through amendments to SSC, which currently says nothing about it.
Or a completely new Bill for unorganised workers’ social security, will have to be drafted. Asking merely for the extension of Employees’ State Insurance (ESI) and Employees Provident Fund (EPF) to unorganised workers may result in difficulties in implementation as those are not geared to suit the particular working conditions of unorganised workers.
This is a long-overdue Bill needed to universalise social security for the crores of unorganised workers working under precarious conditions.
The author is the Executive Trustee of CIVIC-Bangalore and a life-member of the Social Security Association of India.
