Welfare fund boards should take immediate action on workers’ complaints and actions, Minister for Labour V. Sivankutty has said.
He was addressing a meeting of welfare fund board chairmen and chief executive officers here on Tuesday.
The Minister stressed the need for board offices to impress on the public that their complaints would be addressed immediately. All offices should be made worker-friendly. They should also have landline facility, he said.
There are 16 welfare fund boards under the Labour Department in the State, and nearly 70 lakh workers are members of these boards. They include pensioners too.
Ineligible people had become members of some welfare boards, thus affecting the purpose of their existence, the Minister said. This was a problem that should be addressed seriously. It should be ensured that only the eligible were members of welfare schemes, he said.
Special drives and campaigns should be conducted by each welfare fund board to increase its membership. There was a need to increase income in order to make welfare funds more attractive. They should be able to become self-sufficient through an increase in income and efficient functioning. They should also look into how to improve benefits given to workers in keeping with the changing times.
Some board officials were not working efficiently to enrol eligible people into welfare schemes and get subscriptions. This should be corrected, the Minister said.
Officials should act to prevent dual membership in the welfare fund boards. Data collection of workers who had registered with the boards should be done to check this. It should also be ensured that eligible people were getting various benefits. The workers should also be aware of the benefits distributed through the boards.
The Minister said a centralised software would be implemented for the 16 boards under the Labour Department. This would help prevent dual membership and disbursal of benefits in a time-bound manner.
The State government’s online taxi system was a revolutionary step in the transport sector. Similar to other online taxi aggregators, the government, Kerala Motor Workers Welfare Fund Board, and ITI Ltd., were implementing the online taxi service ‘Kerala Savari’. Its pilot had been included in the 100-day action plan and would be launched in Thiruvananthapuram district, the Minister said.
