Welfare board sitting on unutilized corpus of over Rs 10,000 crores meant only for labour welfare
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Mumbai: Construction workers in Maharashtra will protest on August 24 seeking monthly Covid-19 aid of Rs 5000 per month and also implementation of various entitled benefits, according to the Maharashtra Construction Workers Union Joint Action Committee convenor Shankar Pujari.
Pujari told thenews21 that the Maharashtra Building and Other Construction Workers’ Welfare Board (MBOCWWB) had failed to implement basic welfare measures for the workers despite sitting on corpus of Rs 9469.19 crores as on June 2020, the highest for any state in the country.
Beyond allocating a basic aid of Rs 2000 on April 18, 2020, that could be accessed by only about nine lakh active workers registered with the board, the state failed to offer any other Covid support for workers, Pujari said.
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Another aid of Rs 3000 by the state labour welfare boards too announced in August 14 is also not expected to reach many workers. An aid of Rs 5000 meant for workers to buy equipments in 2017 was arbitrarily suspended on February 2020 on grounds that many bogus workers had sought aid using that provision. The workers registered with the board were thus denied the benefit of Rs 5000 for not fault of theirs, he stated. There are about 4.5 lakh applicants pending for registration of workers.
According to the mahabocw.in, there are 18, 75510 registered workers in Maharashtra and 20, 28903 workers have benefitted from various schemes in the state since the inception of the board in 2011.
Labour reforms in the construction sector have been much delayed. Though the Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Act was passed in 1996, it was enforced in 2007 and the BOCW Board was set up in Maharashtra only in 2011, according to Pujari.
The action forum is also demanding implementation of various welfare measures like provision of Rs 2 lakhs for construction of houses for construction workers aid of Rs. 50,000 each for the marriage of the daughters of construction workers.
Real estate sector in India is the second largest employment source in India for minimally skilled workers with about 55 million people engaged across the country and contributing about 9% to the nation’s GDP. It is also instrumental in employing large masses of migratory populations.
