Spelling out details of its promise to ensure shramik nyay or justice for labour, the Congress on Tuesday said it would include the right to health, urban employment guarantee, increase in wages for MGNREGA workers up to ₹400 and reviving labour laws to protect the working class interest in its manifesto.
Addressing a press conference at the All India Congress Committee (AICC) headquarters, senior party leader and former MP Sandeep Dikshit said the working class had suffered the worst during the last 10 years of the Modi regime and deserved special attention.
He said that once the INDIA government comes to power, the party would bring a law for urban employment that would also include comprehensive social security, including health and accident insurance cover.
“We will bring back the labour laws that protect the workers. Right now, they are Labour Codes which don’t mean much,” Mr. Dikshit claimed, adding that INDIA bloc would abolish the contractual system of employment and regular jobs would be provided.
He disclosed that till 2018-19, more than three crore people had joined the agriculture labour. After 2014-15, about 6.5 crore people had migrated from other places and gone into agriculture. “This has happened for the first time in country’s history,” he said.
Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge, in a post on X, said the growth rate of wages between 2014-15 and 2021-22 was less than one per cent per year during the tenure of the Modi government.
Mr. Kharge disclosed that the growth rate of wages for farm workers was only 0.9% while it was just 0.2% for construction workers and 0.3% for non-agricultural workers. Drawing comparisons with the Congress-led UPA-2 between 2009 and 2014, the Congress chief said the real agricultural and non-agricultural rural wages grew at the rate of 8.6% and 6.9% per year respectively.
In contrast, he pointed out, the growth rate of real rural wages in the second term of the Modi government had become negative for both agriculture (-0.6%) and non-agricultural rural wages (-1.4%). “The Modi government has snatched the right to work from seven crore people in the last two years. That is why the Congress has accorded top priority to Shramik Nyay”, Mr. Kharge said.
