New Delhi: The Congress is upbeat that the Modi government is pursuing Rahul Gandhi’s social justice agenda but is miffed over the BJP’s cold response to the caste census issue. According to party insiders, the Centre recently copied the internship scheme for youth from the Congress's 2024 Lok Sabha polls manifesto and announced it in the Union Budget 2024-25 and was now contemplating a national law for the welfare of gig economy workers which had also been promised by the grand old party.
Both ideas originated during Rahul Gandhi’s first nationwide Bharat Jodo Yatra in 2022 which later became part of his ‘5 Nyay and 25 Guarantees’ plan that formed the basis of the Congress's 2024 manifesto.
It was under Rahul’s influence that first the party’s government in Rajasthan headed by Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot in 2023 and later in Karnataka headed by Chief Minister K Siddaramaiah announced a law for the welfare of gig economy workers who have no social security. A similar promise is yet to be implemented in party-ruled Telangana.
Rahul recently had an interaction with a cab driver in Delhi and had earlier met food delivery agents in Bengaluru in 2023 to flag the concerns of millions of gig economy workers across the country.
“See, Rahul Gandhi is rightly called the people’s LoP. He has been talking about the concerns of the common man for decades. It is good that PM Modi who used to criticize the Congress manifesto is now implementing the social welfare ideas of our leader. First, they copied our internship scheme and now the proposed national law for the welfare of gig economy workers. It shows that the politics of our leader is in the right direction,” AICC functionary Chandan Yadav told ETV Bharat.
According to AICC functionary BM Sandeep, Rahul Gandhi had been ridiculed by the BJP through a campaign to tarnish his image but he had been proved right on various counts.
“He alerted the government on shortcomings in the fight against Covid pandemic, demonetization, faulty GST, the welfare of unorganized sector workers and also on the need for a caste census. However, the Centre is yet to respond favourably to Rahul Gandhi’s caste census demand which will give us exact numbers of various social groups and will help in the distribution of social welfare funds judiciously. The problem is that the BJP talks about OBC welfare but does not want a caste census which is being demanded now by even their allies like JD-U and LJP,” Sandeep told ETV Bharat.
According to a 2022 NITI Ayog report, in 2020–21 77 lakh workers were engaged in the gig economy which constituted 2.6 per cent of the non-agricultural workforce or 1.5 percent of the total workforce in India.
The gig economy workforce was expected to expand to 2.35 crore by 2029–30 and form 6.7 per cent of the non-agricultural workforce or 4.1 per cent of the total livelihood in the country.
As per the report, about 47 per cent of the gig work was in medium-skilled jobs, about 22 per cent in high skilled, and about 31 per cent in low-skilled jobs. Trends showed the concentration of workers in medium skills was gradually declining and that of the low skilled and high skilled was increasing.
To harness the potential of the gig-platform sector, the report recommended accelerating access to finance through products specifically designed for workers, linking self-employed individuals engaged in the business of selling regional and rural cuisine, street food, etc., with platforms to enable them to sell their produce to wider markets in towns and cities.
The report suggested platform-led transformational and outcome-based skilling, enhancing social inclusion through gender sensitization and accessibility awareness programs for workers and their families and extending social security measures in partnership mode as envisaged in the Code on Social Security 2020.
Other recommendations included undertaking a separate enumeration exercise to estimate the size of the gig and platform workforce and collecting information during official enumerations to identify gig workers.
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