Baseline rights of workers in India have traditionally been dealt with under numerous,often overlapping, labour laws and overseen by multiple regulators. The approach hasmostly been a compliance (tick the box) exercise with hardly any emphasis on businesses’ accountability to improve labour conditions for a large section of the workforce.
The Indian government is now in the process of consolidating 29 existing labour lawsinto four labour codes (the Codes). These codes cover the critical rights of wages,social security, industrial relations, and safety, health and working conditions of workmen. The much-needed modernisation of labour laws is an opportunity for thegovernment and business to move away from a prescriptive top-down approach to amore consultative and sustainable effort to address the core issue of protecting human rights of workmen. Further, their enforcement comes at a time when companies areincreasingly being judged on their sustainable business and human rights (BHR)policies by regulators, courts and civil society.
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