Mamata rolls out worker welfare schemes, opposition says old ones, new names

On November 24, the West Bengal finance department issued a notification announcing Rs 2 lakh in post-retirement benefits to all contract workers in the unorganised sector. Former Left Front labour minister and CITU (Centre of Indian Trade Unions) state president Anadi Sahoo promptly cited his government's Rs 1.5 lakh package and sundry benefits for superannuated workers. He claimed the Mamata Banerjee government had merely repackaged the old scheme as its own.

With panchayat polls slated for early 2018, the Trinamool Congress government is racing to ensure that a significant majority of the state's 100 million residents benefit from its schemes. This includes some 40,000 contractual workers in various government departments and nearly 15 million in the unorganised sector.

But there's a problem. Left-affiliated unions have a membership of 1.7 million and the Congress-controlled INTUC another 600,000 among unorganised sector workers. The TMC's INTTUC, by contrast, doesn't yet have a prominent footprint, which is why Mamata is rolling out social security sops as a fallback.

Alive to the plan, Left leaders say it won't be easy to hoodwink the workers. "We are educating them on how the government is repackaging old schemes under new names with limited benefits," says Debanjan Chakrabarti, general secretary of a Left-affiliated construction workers union.

In a bid to make them uniform, the government is bringing all social welfare schemes-for construction, transport, beedi industry and other workers-under a single umbrella. But while this has benefitted some, it has also hurt the interests of others like transport workers whose benefits were derived from the lucrative annual cess on licence renewals.

Left leaders say they fear funds will be misappropriated after the schemes are clubbed, as it will give the government control over a Rs 1,800 crore reserve from workers' provident fund contributions and cess-linked schemes. Insisting that cess-linked schemes that involve the Centre cannot be merged, they have petitioned the labour commissioner. "Beedi workers used to get financial assistance to build houses and for electricity connections. Every year, workers could avail of Rs 30,000 in medical benefit under RSVY (Rashtriya Sam Vikas Yojana) for treatment in government hospitals. Now everything is merged under one medical insurance scheme," complains Sahoo. TMC leaders, however, say they have been able to end the disparities amid different categories of workers. The interest from the corpus (reserve) fund, they point out, will part-fund workers' pensions.

Even more contentiously, the TMC government has withdrawn the right of trade union leaders to verify or attest the eligibility of workers for retirement benefits. Under the current dispensation, only elected people's representatives can do so. Left leaders allege this has been done to weaken the trade unions and benefit the TMC cadre.