India has ratified 37 conventions and its performance is better than that of the US and Canada, he said. International Labour Standards have exerted a powerful influence on India in the areas like protection of human rights and social and developmental policies even without ratifying many of these conventions. The workshop is being organised by Standing Conference of Public Enterprises (SCOPE) in cooperation with International Labour Organisation.

Ratification depends on various factors like relevance of a convention to a country, its stage of economic development and infrastructure for implementation, he said. Besides several ILO standards were unrealistic in relation to the conditions prevailing in developing countries, he said. Many countries havelinked international trade with ``fair labour standards,'' which, he said, have not met with the desired objective, he said. He pointed out that only 10 per cent of the total workforce in India is in the organised sector and the majority of the workforce is in the unorganised or informal sector for whom standards are of distant relevance.

Referring to the ILO convention on freedom of association he said that there were problems in its observance in respect of public employees though it was largely implemented. Referring to child labour he said that government had evolved a national policy on child labour consistent with a resolution of the ILO conference of 1979. India has been adopting measures to eliminate child labour in hazardous employments by 2002 and it was improper to equate all child labour with bonded labour he said.

L P Massun, ILO representative in India in his address referred to the influence of standards on international action in the fields of human rights, social policy and development.He referred to the need for making efforts to gear the benefits of globalisation in terms of social progress. He expressed his happiness that India had decided to ratify the ILO convention on employment policy and was considering the possibility of ratifying convention on abolition of forced labour.

I P Anand in his presidential remarks referred to the rigidity of ILO standards and deprecated the tendency of western countries to link international trade with the observance of some of the core ILO standards.