The High Court of Karnataka on Thursday suggested to the State government to create a policy and mechanism for utilising sums from the huge corpus with the Building and other Construction Workers’ Welfare Fund for educating out-of-school children of migrant labourers.
A Division Bench comprising Justice K.L. Manjunath and Justice Raghvendra S. Chauhan made this suggestion during the hearing of a public interest litigation petition initiated suo motu by the court based on newspaper reports in 2013.
Orally observing that the State had no policy for migrant labourers and their children, the Bench asked government counsel to inform the State to evolve a policy.
Of the 1.7 lakh identified out-of-school children, the government was able to admit a majority of them to schools but has been facing difficulties in locating 14,489 children of migrant labourers to admit them to schools.
Advantage of IT
Mr. Justice Chauhan, who recently came to the High Court of Karnataka on his transfer from Rajasthan High Court, pointed out that it should not be much difficult for the Karnataka government to track these children as the State was well developed unlike Rajasthan, and had the advantage of information technology to its aide.
