The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Farm workers want welfare board reactivated

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Jun 19, 2006

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Farm workers want welfare board reactivated

Special Correspondent

It also demands implementation of Kolappan committee recommendations

CHENNAI: The Tamil Maanila Vivasaya Thozhilalar Sangam has urged the Government to take early steps to reactivate the welfare board for farm workers set up during the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam rule in November, 2000.

The general council, which met at Courtallam on Saturday, alleged that the board became defunct in the previous AIADMK rule. The board was formed to extend pension, accident relief, scholarship, marriage assistance and maternity benefits to agricultural workers. As many as seven lakh farmhands, including a large number of women, became members of the board, remitting Rs.100 each. It was also announced that the board had collected Rs.7.5 crore in membership fees. However, the activities of the board were stalled after the AIADMK Government was formed in 2001. Now that a new Government was in place after the May 8 Assembly elections, the board should be reactivated, it said.

It also sought the Chief Minister's intervention in this regard.

Through another resolution, the sangam urged the Government to implement at once the recommendations of the Kolappan Committee, which was constituted in 1997.

The panel's recommendations on improving the living conditions of farm workers had been put in cold storage for the last eight years.

The sangam demanded that the Government convene a meeting of Collectors and representatives of farm workers' organisations to evolve a strategy to ensure successful implementation of the minimum wages for agricultural labourers. Though the Government had fixed Rs.80 for men for six-hour work and Rs.70 for women for five-hour work, in many districts women workers had been paid wages ranging from Rs.15 to Rs.30 for working throughout the day, it said.

Commending the Chief Minister for withdrawing cases "foisted" on leaders of political parties and the media persons, who had highlighted starvation deaths in the Cauvery delta due to unprecedented drought and floods from 2002 to 2005, the Sangam appealed to the Government to provide cash relief to the kin of the deceased at the rate of Rs. five lakh per family.

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