Government to look into shortage of judges in labour courts: Narendra Singh Tomar

NEW DELHI: In an effort to speedily resolve disputes between the employees and the employers, ministry of labour and employment has said that it will look into the issue of unavailability of judges in the labour courts across the country on priority basis.

The assurance came from labour minister Narendra Singh Tomar during his meeting with at least a dozen employer’s association on Monday.

"The issue of labour courts being deprived of judges has been raised by the employers’ association. We agree that this is a problem and the government will try to address this on priority basis," Tomar said after the meeting. Minister’s meeting with the employers’ association was the last in the series of the tripartite consultation as the Narendra Modi government takes on the long-overdue labour reforms in the country.

Prior to this, the minister and his officials havemet labour unions and labour ministers of all states. Nearly 5000 cases are pending in 22 Central Government Industrial Tribunals-cum-Labour Courts, mainly because of unavailability of sufficient number of judges to dispose off the cases in a time-bound manner.

These labour courts were set up by the central government under the provisions of Industrial Disputes Act, 1947 for resolution of industrial disputes arising in central sphere.

PF CODE ONLINE

Meanwhile, in an effort to ease the process of registration for establishments, the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation has launched the online registration system for allotment of provident fund code number.

The ministry feels that this e-governance initiative will help India improve its ranking in the World Bank’s ease of doing business report. The manual process for obtaining the PF code takes up to 25 days.