Budget 2024: emphasis on ease of doing business, with a new labor welfare and employment index planned
Budget 2024: In order to compare and encourage labor law uniformity among states, the government has developed an employment and labor welfare index with a focus on ease of doing business.
According to unnamed official sources, the government is creating a “Labour Welfare and Employment Index” (LWEI) to rank states and union territories according to employment, labor welfare, social security coverage, and production. This will promote “healthy competition” among the states and guarantee consistency in how labor rules are applied in each state.
When will the index plan likely be formally unveiled?
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is expected to reveal the idea during the budget speech in the fourth week of July.
This bears similarities to the Labour Rights Index, an international qualification benchmark that is used to compare labor laws in 135 nations worldwide.
What steps has the government taken in the past to make doing business easier?
As part of its earlier efforts to streamline the labor laws, the government reduced the number of labor laws from 44 to only four codes in 2019–20. The 2020 Code on Social Security, the 2020 Code on Occupational Safety, Health, and Working Conditions, the 2020 Code on Industrial Relations, and the 2019 Code on Wages are some of these codes.
This was done to encourage decriminalization and lessen the requirements for compliance, which would make conducting business easier.
Citing government sources, that the Union Budget is allegedly focused on enhancing the ease of doing business this year by decriminalizing over 100 provisions across numerous laws, including the Income Tax Act, in the second iteration of the Jan Vishwas Bill.
The Jan Vishwas bill expedites and improves the efficiency of the legal system by substituting monetary sanctions for criminal prosecutions and incarceration for minor offenses.
This helps many courts, which are already overloaded with cases involving minor offenses, by allowing severe matters to be addressed more quickly.
