Draft National Policy on migrant labour
- February 21, 2021
- Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
- Category: DPN Topics
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Draft National Policy on migrant labour
Subject: Policies of government
Context: Based on a request from the labour ministry the Niti Aayog released first Draft National Policy on migrant labor yesterday.
Concept:
- According to the Minister of State (Independent Charge) of Labour and Employment in Parliament last year 10 million labourers went back of home due to migrant crisis last year.
- Demands from states, experts and civil society has led to Niti Aayog formulating a draft National migrant labour policy which is in public domain now.
Proposals under the policy
- the draft policy calls for a “rights-based” approach that taps the migrants’ potential rather than hand-outs and cash-transfers.
- Mechanisms to “enable voting” to ensure the political inclusion of migrant workers so they can demand their entitlements and fix political accountability
- Setting up inter-state coordination mechanisms to cover the nation’s key migration corridors: Uttar Pradesh and Mumbai; Bihar and Delhi; Western Odisha and Andhra Pradesh; Rajasthan and Gujarat, and Odisha and Gujarat
- Ministry of Labour to set up a special unit on migration
- Embedding a migration wing in each state’s labour department and source states to send nodal officers to destination states to work collectively with the labour officers
- Getting source states and destination states to work with each other
- Government policies should not hinder but seek to facilitate internal migration.
- Migrants should be the target of Disaster Risk Reduction (DDR) programmers in urban centres.
- Access to health and other social protection programmes should be portable across state borders.
- Skill mapping using Aadhaar to avail of social security schemes, psycho-social assistance through a national helpline.
- Tribal department to have one inspector at the block level and Labour one at the district level.
Some causes identified by the Niti Aayog group with respect to Migrant crisis:
- Fragmented labour market obscures supply chains and relationships between business owners and workers
- The existing gap in the unionization of migrant workers is also an important reason for the precarious nature of their employment
- Government policies at times does not facilitate internal migration rather act as a hindrance
- States have limited engagement with migrants. For example, in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, anti-trafficking units focused on minor women have suffered with inadequate staff and poor supervision of migration trends
- Concerns in schemes Ex- MNREGA and State Rural Livelihood Mission are meant to check out-migration by tribals but that hasn’t quite happened as tribals are not “actively included” in skill development schemes and were not able to access them because of “lack of awareness and tedious paper work and processes