The Union and State governments should identify migrant labourers and provide them timely welfare during the pandemic.
There are still a lot of migrant t labourers who don’t have ration cards. The Centre’s Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana covers 80 crore poor as beneficiaries under the National Food Security Act.
There should be a mechanism to identify and provide food for people who do not have ration cards. When the government had imposed lockdown last year to prevent the spread of Covid-19, it had a brutal impact on millions of India’s informal workers.
Left overnight without the daily wage jobs that sustained them, many of them did not have the documents necessary to access social security benefits, most notably, subsidised food through the public distribution system.
There is no proper data of how many workers have registered under the Inter State Migrant Workers Act. Under this law, establishments or contractors hiring migrant workers are supposed to register and provide them with facilities such as displacement allowance, journey allowances, full payment of wages, a suitable place for the accommodation, medical facilities and more.
During the 2020 lockdown, as workers lost their sources of employment, many were forced to take loans. The lack of portability for the ration scheme is the main obstacle for migrant workers accessing rations in the cities.
