Tamil Nadu has scored well in the labour law reform index and in industrial development. In the last two years, the State has not witnessed an untoward event, or lost even a single day due to lockouts or strikes in industrial units. Lockouts, man-day lost due to strikes, have come down drastically. Militant employees are history, said Labour Secretary Mohan Pyare, releasing a study on ‘Comparison on Labour laws: Select countries’ compiled by the Export-Import Bank of India.
“Even though no radical changes have been made in the Labour Laws in the State, the labour’s behaviour has changed a lot. However, there are many criticisms that there was a need to modernise labour laws as the existing ones affected the common man. Besides, the State government was making sincere effort in providing a favourable climate for the employers/employees within the purview of labour law,” he said. According to the study, Tamil Nadu along with Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh scored well in the labour law reform index and has also progressed in industrial development compared to Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Jammu and Kashmir and West Bengal.
Madras Chamber of Commerce and Industry, president, T. Shivaraman asked why India’s import was growing faster than exports and why India was doing extremely well only in few sectors. He said that Exim bank research was carried out on 20 countries based on 15 parameters. However, the performance of India was quite different only in three parameters – factory size, number of people employed and hi-tech manufacturing. On an average, an Indian firm had a minimum of 75 workers against China’s 191 and Indonesia’s 178, despite the fact that most of the units in India were largely labour intensive. Provisions of labour laws could be one of the reasons responsible for the enterprises remaining small in size, he said.
