Indian Economy GK Questions with Answers – Page 27

It inserted several Directive Principles, among them Article 43A on the participation of workers in the management of industrial undertakings, Article 39A on equal justice and free legal aid, and Article 48A on the protection of the environment.

The code sets up a Worker Re-skilling Fund to which the employer contributes fifteen days' wages for every retrenched worker, and the amount is to be credited to that worker's account within forty-five days of retrenchment so that it can be used while finding new work.

The code extends to all industrial establishments the requirement, earlier limited to public utility services, that no person shall go on strike and no employer declare a lock-out without fourteen days' notice, and the strike must begin within sixty days of that notice.

The code doubles the thresholds of the Factories Act, 1948, the argument being that small units were burdened with compliance meant for larger ones, while the criticism is that many workers now fall outside the factory provisions.

The Maternity Benefit Act, 1961 originally provided twelve weeks; the amendment of 2017 raised it to twenty-six weeks for the first two children, and the Code on Social Security carries that provision forward along with a creche facility in larger establishments.

Entry 22 covers trade unions and industrial and labour disputes, Entry 23 social security and social insurance including employment and unemployment, and Entry 24 the welfare of labour including conditions of work and provident funds, so both Parliament and the state legislatures can legislate, and each state notifies its own…

It fixes a floor wage after taking into account the minimum living standards of a worker, and may set different floor wages for different geographical areas; no state may then fix a minimum wage below that floor.

It defines a gig worker as one who works outside a traditional employer-employee relationship, a platform worker as one who gets work through an online platform, and an aggregator as the digital intermediary that connects buyer and seller, and it provides a social security fund for such workers.

The code raises the threshold from the earlier figure and also makes three hundred the point at which certified standing orders become compulsory, so one number serves two provisions.

These three Acts dealt with the registration of unions, the conditions of service to be published as standing orders, and the machinery for disputes, lay-off, retrenchment and closure, and all three subjects are now in one code.

The four codes subsume twenty-nine central labour enactments: four in the Code on Wages, three in the Industrial Relations Code, nine in the Code on Social Security and thirteen in the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code.

The policy of 2021 named four strategic sectors: atomic energy, space and defence; transport and telecommunications; power, petroleum, coal and other minerals; and banking, insurance and financial services.

The National Investment Fund was set up in that year so that money raised by selling government equity would not simply fill the revenue gap.

The Disinvestment Commission was constituted in 1996 as an advisory body to examine enterprises referred to it and to recommend the extent, method and timing of disinvestment in each case, and it was chaired by G. V. Ramakrishna, formerly the chairman of SEBI.

The three real grades are Maharatna, Navratna and Miniratna, and the last is itself divided into category one and category two, so there are four levels in practice.

In 1999 and 2000 the government sold seventy-four per cent of this bread-making company to Hindustan Lever along with management control, and it is counted as India's first strategic sale, that is, the first real privatisation of a central enterprise.

In official usage strategic disinvestment, or strategic sale, means that the government sells a substantial block of shares and hands over management control to the buyer, so the enterprise passes out of the public sector.

It was created as the Department of Disinvestment in 1999, was a separate Ministry of Disinvestment from 2001 to 2004, returned as a department and was given its present name in April 2016.

In that financial year, following the balance of payments crisis and the New Industrial Policy, the government began selling small blocks of shares of selected enterprises to financial institutions and mutual funds.

It is called the Economic Constitution of India because it settled for more than three decades which industries belonged to the state and which to private enterprise, through its Schedules A, B and C, and because it gave the Second Five Year Plan its heavy industry direction under the Mahalanobis…