NEW DELHI: Even as the world celebrated May Day on Tuesday, the National Campaign for Eradication of Inequality — a conglomerate of workers' organisations — petitioned President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam to instruct the Centre to rectify anomalies and remove distortion in the entitlements for work in different sectors of national economy.

In a memorandum submitted to the President, it demanded the framing of a national wage policy and immediate suspension of the Sixth Pay Commission, announced by the Centre sometime ago.

Omission no routine lapse

"The omission in not framing a wage policy is not a routine administrative lapse. The issue was not touched for fear of the exposure of subterfuges that have been adopted in the realm of wage entitlement in the unorganised sector since Independence,'' the memorandum said.

Addressing a press conference here, B.D. Sharma of the Bharat Jan Andolan — a constituent of the NCEI — said the most serious distortion in wage determination was related to non-adoption of the premise `wage for the worker and his family' enshrined in the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights and reaffirmed in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

"It is a mystery how the crucial elements of family got omitted in the Directive Principles of State Policy while framing the Constitution,'' he pointed out.

Driving home the point, Mr. Sharma, former chairperson of the National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, said that even the highly `eulogised' National Rural Employment Guarantee Act has adopted the same norm while envisaging the minimum wage at "not less than Rs. 60 per day as against the requirement of Rs. 133 per day for bare subsistence.''

Stoic silence

Mr. Sharma said that all political establishments had maintained stoic silence over this issue that affected the unorganised sector workers, particularly in rural India.

Also, the classification of the most dextrous work in agriculture as "unskilled'' coupled with low wages had rendered agriculture as unviable.

Fall in GDP share

"All this has resulted in a sharp fall in their share in the Gross Domestic Product from 65 per cent in 1947 to just 20 per cent in 2005 with a projection of just 6 per cent in 2020 while the number of people engaged has only marginally declined from 70 per cent to 65 per cent ,'' he said.

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