The Hindu Business Line : Unorganised sector employees — Australian consortium to submit pension plan report by April

A FIVE-MEMBER consortium headed by Mr Chris Butel of the Australia-based New South Global Pty Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of the University of New South Wales, is working out a pension scheme for the approximately 37-crore workforce employed in the unorganised labour market in India.

The team includes Mr Graham Bird, regulation specialist from Canada-based Lawrie Savage & Associates Inc; Indian pension sector specialist Mr Gautam Bhardwaj; and the domestic legal expert and former Executive Director (Legal) of the Securities and Exchange Board of India, Ms D.N. Rawal.

According to sources, it was the erstwhile NDAGovernment which gave the responsibility of working out a pension scheme for the unorganised sector workers to the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

Following a mandate from the Finance Ministry, the ADB floated a global tender and finally a consortium was selected for the job. The ADB commissioned the job contract, valued at $8,47,000 (approximately Rs 3.72 crore), to the consortium of New South Global, Lawrie Savage & Associates Inc and Invest India Economic Foundation on May 5, 2004.

According to sources, the broad framework of the scheme would be something similar to the New Pension Scheme (NPS) introduced for Government employees from this year.

The consortium would be submitting its report by the end of April 2005.

The whole exercise would be carried out in four phases. The first phase, which is currently on, comprises a pre-survey research spread over eight States where discussions would be held with focus groups comprising 700-800 members from the target segment. The objective of the first phase would be to finalise the sampling process, methodology and survey instruments.

The survey is being conducted by ORG-AC Nielsen. The AC Nielsen spokesman, Mr Adrian Terron, refused to share any information.

But all the Central trade unions, who had been fighting for years for the rights of the unorganised sector workers, are unhappy about the entire development. According to Mr Sanjeeva Reddy of the INTUC, "Data collected by commercial organisations and formulas derived from them would only be theoretical ones without any practical basics." Mr Reddy said that the INTUC would like to take up the issue with the Government.

The Left unions are also unanimous that the entire exercise may turn useless. They feel that the Panchayat institutions should be taken into confidence instead of commercial organisations.

In the second phase, likely to be from September to November this year, actual data would be collected from approximately 42,000 households of the target group spread across 29 States.

In the third phase (from November 2004 to January 2005) the data would be analysed and in the fourth and final phase, the team would propose ideas for regulations, products, accesses, services and overall protection of interest of the unorganised sector.

Sources said that the scheme would primarily target to identify relatively organised areas within the sector and try to make use of micro-credit institutes such as SEWA and others to draw a simple scheme so that workers are able to understand it.