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Journalism of Courage
The country’s landless agricultural workers have to wait for yet another session of Parliament. They have, in fact, been waiting since the ’70s — years before the women’s quota in the Lok Sabha and Assemblies became an issue.
The legislation promised every now and then over the last two decades and more is one with so limited an aim as not to warrant comparison with the women’s Bill which has, in turn, been pledged and denied periodically to half the population.
The aim of the agricultural workers’ Bill is not empowerment but a rudimentary regulation of employment, ensuring basic service conditions and some welfare schemes for the beneficiaries.
There is nothing revolutionary about this package which includes statutorily stipulated working hours, minimum wages, an effective dispute resolution mechanism, and a social security scheme funded by the employers’ contribution as well.
It is so unexceptionable that no serious objection to such protection for the farm labour has been forthcoming from sevensuccessive labour ministers’ conferences from 1981 to last year, while the proposal earned the strong endorsement of the National Commission for Agricultural Labour seven years ago.
Lack of political will to push through the legislation, however, has led to attempts to treat it as the concern of the loonie Left alone. Thus it is invariably put off till the next Lok Sabha session.
It is this tried and tested tactic that the Centre has resorted to again. The United Front government under Deve Gowda is being given a rather undeserved reputation for pro-poor radicalism by the Centre, thanks to its own attempts to shelve the Bill drawn up by the previous government.
The ostensible reason for these dilatory tactics is the inter-state diversity of conditions that makes it difficult to secure the concurrence of state governments on the issue. This, surely, is an untenable excuse. There can be no Central legislation on most socio-economic subjects if nationwide uniformity were to be made an indispensablecondition. In any case, if diversity of similar description did not make such protection impossible for industrial workers, why should it do so for the agricultural workforce alone? Is it possible to modernise agriculture but not its labour practices?
The beneficiaries of the Bill-that-never-was constitute the biggest segment of unorganised labour. The irony is that numerous governments at the Centre have acknowledged their commitment to this constituency and to their legislative improvement.
The over 80 million farm workers, including bonded labourers, comprising nearly 10 per cent of the population, deserve the promised deal especially because many of them are doubly oppressed — as Dalits and as landless labour.
The official view on the issue is almost amusing in its hypocrisy. Union Labour Minister S. Jatia is believed to have maintained that there is no exploitation of agricultural labour and, therefore, no need for additional protection through a special legislation. Surely, this argument does notneed to be answered seriously. It does, however, indicate that this important Bill will continue to exist as a piece of paper for some more time.
