Good or bad, Yashwant Sinha's budget may have whipped up primal passions elsewhere, but it has left the labour lobby stone cold. Despite the studied grandstanding on contentious labour issues, most of his proposals were summarily dismissed by trade unionists.
Seething with silent frustration, labour leaders let out steam by methodically dismantling each tenet of Sinha's scheme. Take the golden handshake package of 45 days salary for each completed year of service. "Steel and textile industries were offering us better packages than that being offered by the finance minister _ but we choose to shun VRS on principle," say M K Pandhe, general secretary, Citu. "This remains a promise on paper; where is the money?" asks C Sinha, general secretary, Intuc.
But strangely, in this hullabaloo over VRS, a novel proposal has virtually gone unremarked upon _ the Reconstruction Fund. The yawns that its predecessor, the National Renewal Fund (NRF), evokes among labour leaders will tell you why. Although the outlines of this newly proposed scheme are still blurred, what with the finance minister confessing he's not had the time to formulate the details, it appears to have more than a little similarity with the much-maligned NRF. And that is quite enough to put off any trade union leader worth his hammer-and-sickle.
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Which explains the reticence of the labour leaders in taking this new scheme seriously. "The NRF has been a futile exercise; it has left a bad taste in the mouth," says G Sanjeeva Reddy, president, Intuc, who is also a director on the NRF board. Conceived as a fast-track instrument to aid post-liberalisation industrial restructuring by providing a workers' safety net, the NRF has been a failure due to lackadaisical administration and financial limitations. "Oh, the board members meet once in a while, discuss fantastic plans, and later admit their inability to do anything because of lack of funds," says Reddy caustically.
What really has gone wrong with NRF since its inception five years ago? During 1993-98, Rs 1819.03 crore has been spent on various NRF schemes, the bulk of which (89 per cent) was accounted for by VRS packages that 1,00,204 public sector employees opted for. Counselling was extended to 14,904 workers, while 19,334 were retrained and 4,488 redeployed _ a modest performance by any stretch of imagination. Other objectives of providing soft loans for restructuring, and funding of special area regeneration schemes and employment generation programmes were given a cold shoulder.
In whatever little that it did manage to get underway, there were problems. "A Standing Labour Committee study has found out that only 10 per cent of retrained workers could actually find jobs. And what's worse, at only one-fourth the previous salaries," says Pandhe, whose union has not sent any representative on the NRF board. "For us, it has always been the National `Retrenchment' Fund." Adds J Chitharanjan, president, Aituc: "The Fund keeps training workers to make candles. How many candle-makers can the country take, for God's sake?"
No wonder this disrepute is already rubbing off on the proposed Reconstruction Fund (RF). Although labour leaders admit that though there is a clear funding mechanism for the RF through disinvestment proceeds and asset stripping of sick PSUs, they still cannot come around to trusting the implementation part of it. "How can you be so sure that disinvestment funds will flow into RF?" asks Chitharanjan. "It just takes a ballooning year-end budgetary deficit to take all courage out of a finance minister."
Adds Sinha: "Anyway, in this kind of market situation, how can the finance minister raise the kind of resources needed to pay compensation to lakhs of workers in the sick public sector units awaiting closure?" And that when the government is yet to pay salaries and outstanding dues worth Rs 418 crore to workers of some sick public sector firms. "On paper, every plan appears rosy," chides Sinha. "But where is the budgetary provision for RF?" Clearly, Yashwant Sinha will have to do more than just walk-the-talk if he wants to be taken seriously.