In Conversation with Honorable Finance Minister Shri. Nirmala Sitharaman - Jyoti Macwan, General Secretary, SEWA and Manali Shah, National Secretary, SEWA

In the first week of January 2025, SEWA represented in the Pre-budget meeting being called upon by the Honorable National Finance Minister Ms. Nirmala Sitharaman. Each year all the National Trade Unions are invited by the Finance Ministry to give their worker centric suggestions in the Union budget being formed for that year. Manali Shah represented SEWA and this year too she talked about various aspects pertaining to the informal economy workers and social security for them. She submitted a Memorandum to the Honorable Minister in this regard.

Shri. Nirmala ji further enquired about the following issues with SEWA

1. Formulation of the Regulation for the Shipbreaking 2024 that excludes the downstream and women workers in it. She asked her Secretary as well as the deputy Labour Secretary present in the meeting to give more details on this.
2. Inclusion of Domestic workers in the E-shram portal and asked Deputy Labour Secretary to do the revert about what can be done for this.
3. She asked the States to report on the Corpus available with the Construction Workers Welfare Board as collected through CESS.
4. When Manali ben mentioned about portability of ID cards for best accessibility by the Migrant workers, Honorable Minister said that State will be asked to follow the “One Nation One Ration” and migrant workers should be included for the same.

Respected Nirmala ji was approached by Manali ben to give an appropriate date and time for an individual meeting with her to discuss issues related to informal sector workers. And it was agreed for them to meet on January 21 2025.

A letter was submitted to the Honorable Minister by Jyoti ben and Manali ben. This letter mentions Worker Centric Social security mechanism for the workers of the informal sector and encourage livelihood for the young workers.

Shipbreaking industry was represented by them in this meeting and it was requested for the inclusion of the downstream workers in this industry in the Draft Regulation for Recycling of Ships 20XX being formed. SEWA’s suggestions on this draft regulations were also submitted to her.

The 7.5 Lakh Beedi workers in our country’s issue of repealed Beedi and Cigar workers Welfare Cess Act, 1966 and repercussion of it were discussed in detail with the Honourable Finance Minister. It was appealed that to ensure better productivity and higher employment opportunities for these vulnerable workers it is important that equivalent funds should be reinstated from the Central budget to the Beedi Welfare Board so that the workers can avail the welfare schemes once again.

It was also highlighted by SEWA’s delegation that the Construction workers Welfare Board required no extra budget allocation requirement from the Government’s side, but requests that mechanism should be formed to link the workers with the ESIC from the unspent amount in the board. The employee and employer contribution should be considered accordingly and the corpus of funds should be transferred to ESIC from the States BOCWWB.

Inclusion of the Domestic workers in the E-shram portal and request to the Ministry for relevant budget allocation, planning and execution for their coverage in the Social security was also discussed in the meeting. The discussion also focused on the migrant workers and request to allocate budget for portability of ID cards for them.

Another important submission to Shri. Nirmala ji from our side was the request to waive the GST on the parametric climate insurance initiative of SEWA for the informal sector women workers. As this will make the insurance product affordable as well as enable us to build up the resilience of these vulnerable workers.