The labour ministry on Wednesday said the government was working on providing migrant workers with employment and relief to help them tide over the current situation arising out of the Covid-19 pandemic. Addressing members of the industry chamber Ficci via a webinar, labour secretary Heerala Samariya said the government has collected the data of migrant workers from states as well as districts.
“We are working towards measures to give them employment as well as relief,” Samariya was quoted as saying in a release issued by the industry chamber. The labour ministry started mapping details of stranded migrant workers from April 8. Along with basic details such as name, age, gender, occupation, residential address, native district/state, details of their bank accounts and aadhhar cards are also being collected.
As per the collected data so far around 20 lakh migrant workers are stranded in various relief camps organised by state government authorities or by their employers or in localities where they are generally clustered. The number of such stranded workers across the country might go up further as the labour ministry is yet to get response from some states and districts.
The ministry of home affairs (MHA) had on April 19 issued a detailed standard operating procedure while allowing suitable deployment of their skills. As per Census, 2001, the total number of internal migrants in India was 309.385 million.
In his address to the members of Ficci, the labour secretary also said that labour reforms would be taken up in a big way in the coming months and labour codes will become a reality soon. “We are going for the labour reforms and have already got the report from our Parliamentary Standing Committee. Also, we are getting report for the industrial relations code, social security code. In coming months, we will see these codes will become the reality,” he said.