PM Inaugurates 44th Indian Labour Conference

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New Delhi (ABC Live) The 44th Session of the Indian Labour Conference, an important forum of the tripartite consultative machinery, was inaugurated by the Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh in New Delhi, today.

The two day conference is being attended by State Labour Ministers, Trade Union Leaders from all the recognised All India Trade Unions, Representatives of all India Employer’s Organisations, Officials from Central Ministries, State Governments and PSUs.

The Conference focuses on 3 key issues: Minimum Wages, Social Security and Employment and Employability.

In his inaugural address, the Prime Minister emphasized that the country cannot achieve the goal of faster and inclusive growth and building a modern industrialized economy without having a sound industrial relations in the country. The industry, the workers and the government must work harmoniously and in partnership with each other, if the country is to achieve rapid progress and the Indian Labour Conference has to play an important role in this regard. He said that as Prime Minister, he had participated in the Indian Labour Conference for the first time in its 40th Session held in the year 2005.

At that time he had said that the UPA Government was committed to ensuring the welfare and well-being of all workers, particularly those in the unorganized sector. He reaffirmed that commitment today and further informed the gathering that the UPA government has worked hard to translate this commitment into action in the last seven and a half years.

He further said that the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojna, which now covers more than 2.5 crore Below Poverty Line families in the unorganized sector, has been extended to cover construction workers, street vendors, MGNREGA beneficiaries, Beedi workers and domestic workers. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme has also succeeded in checking distress migration substantially from our villages and brought about an improvement in the wages of rural workers. For ESIC coverage, the threshold limit of establishments has been brought down from 20 to 10 persons.

 Large-scale infrastructure and IT modernization, provisions for super-specialty treatment and other such measures have led to an improvement in the ESIC’s services to the beneficiaries. The Employees Provident Fund Organization has taken major steps to widen its coverage especially among construction workers and computerising records of its 60 million members significantly improve quality of services.

The Prime Minister while according special importance to the issue of employment and employability emphasised the need to provide gainful opportunities to large number of young people who join the work force every year by equipping them with demand driven marketable skills. He shared that the rapid growth of the Indian economy since 2004 has clearly brought out the shortcomings of our skill development processes. Recognizing this problem, the government has launched the Skill Development Mission, which seeks to bring about a massive increase in the number of formally trained workers through Public Private Partnership.

 The government is also in the process of designing and developing a National Vocational Qualification Framework for competency standards, affiliation and accreditation. The efforts of the various Ministries/Departments that are involved in skill training are being coordinated to expand outreach and increase accessibility. The Ministry of Labour & Employment has also embarked upon the task of establishing 1500 New Industrial Training Institutes and 5000 Skill Development Centres in the country during the next three years. In this context, he also called upon the Private Sector to engage itself much more vigorously if the country has to overcome this challenge.