State yet to get its first jobless worker claimant of Centre’s Shramik Kalyan Yojana

Nearly three years after it was launched, the Rajiv Gandhi Shramik Kalyan Yojana, which promises affected workers half their pay for six months, is yet to report a single successful claimant in West Bengal. The reason: Affected workers here find it impossible to get the “closure” certificate from their employer. With the Employees State Insurance Corp (ESIC), the Union government body that administers the scheme, unable to make any payment without this certificate, the jobless workers are unable to reap the benefits of the scheme.

Under the scheme, all workers covered by the ESIC who are laid off or rendered jobless by a factory closure are eligible to get half their pay for a maximum of six months, provided they can show that they lost their job because of a factory closure, or were retrenched or were declared permanently invalid because of a non-employment injury. Also, they must have been members of the ESIC for at least five years.

When launched in 2005, the scheme was expected to provide a much-needed social security cover to the eight million employees registered with the ESIC, which in turn had set aside Rs 300 crore for possible expenses under the scheme. The ESIC is to pay the unemployment relief without levying any extra charge on the employers or employees.

“We have not handled any application so far. It could be due to a total lack of awareness about the scheme,” said Subesh Das, principal secretary to the state labour department.

Das claimed that, even at the national level, hardly Rs one crore has been distributed under the scheme.

The ESI’s regional director, BK Sahu, said that when a factory closes down, workers covered by the ESI have to file a benefit claim with the nearest ESIC branch office together with supporting documents, including a “closure certificate” from the company.

But this is easier said than done. Most companies refuse this certificate for obvious reasons —- if a company declares itself as closed officially, it has to clear all statutory payments like provident fund and gratuity.

“Even our efforts to help procure the certificate on behalf of the employees from state government authorities has not paid off,” said Sahu.

Meanwhile, a state government scheme launched way back in 1998 with more or less the same aim has been doing well. Under the Scheme for Financial Assistance to Workers in Locked-Out Industrial Units (FAWLOI), the state gives Rs 500 per month to every worker of a factory or tea garden lying closed for more than a year.

In last year’s state budget, finance minister Asim Dasgupta had raised this amount to Rs 750 per month.

“This has been quite successful and even this year (ongoing financial year), we have released Rs 30 crore for this purpose,” Dasgupta said.

Until 2005-06, the number of closed units was 266, and 35,220 workmen benefited from the state scheme.

Kali Ghosh, the state secretary of CITU, the CPM’s labour arm, said he had known from the start that the ESI scheme would not work.

“I had told them (the authorities) at the very beginning that the scheme would not work. It is a tedious one and workers in West Bengal have a better option in terms of the state government scheme which is quite successful,” said Ghosh.

Subrata Mukherjee, the Intuc’s state president, professed surprise at the poor response to the Rajiv Gandhi Shramik Kalyan Yojana in the state.