In its bid to make compliance easy, the Labour Ministry has done away with overlapping fields in the nine central labour laws and reduced the number of registers as well from 56 to five, Bandaru Dattatreya, Minister of State for Labour and Employment (Independent Charge), said here today.

Conceding that there are various labour rules and laws in the country, and under the various laws there is a requirement for maintaining registers depending upon the threshold of employees, he said it was observed that 56 registers and forms had to be maintained under nine Central Acts, including the Building and Other Construction Workers (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service Act, 1996, The Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, Equal Remuneration Act, Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act, Mines Act, Minimum Wages Act, Payment of Wages Act, Sales Promotion Employees Act, Working Journalists and Other Newspaper Employees Act, and the fields were either overlapping or redundant.

The Ministry issued an intent notification in November last to reduce the number of registers and do away with overlapping fields.

This exercise helped bring down the number of fields to 144 from 933 and the registers to five from 56. This would now help save efforts, cost and improve compliance by the various establishments.

The Ministry has also simultaneously undertaken to develop software for the five common registers.

Once this is done, it would be made available on the Shram Suvidha Portal for free download.

The effort is aimed at facilitating maintenance of the registers in digitised form, the Minister said and added that close to one crore youth joined the labour market every year and this is a “huge challenge” for the government.

The Sixth Economic Census of the Central Statistical Office (conducted during 2013-14) shows that India has about 5.85 crore establishments, of which the non-agricultural establishments alone account for 4.54 crore.

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