KOCHI: The Labour Department has registered 26,000 migrant workers in Ernakulam district under the insurance project of the state government. The department has started facilitation centres in the district and deployed several officers for registering migrant workers under the scheme.“The department is primarily targeting workers in Ernakulam. Registration of workers from other states under the insurance scheme started from October 20. In the last two weeks, we registered 26,000 labourers in Ernakulam,” A Alexander, Additional Labour Commissioner, told ‘Express.’
“The target is to register one lakh migrant workers in Ernakulam by December 31. Across Kerala, five lakh migrant labourers will be registered,” he said. Alexander said several teams under various assistant labour officers have been constituted to register migrant workers under the scheme. “The workers are registered online. Our officers collect the address and biometric details of workers and directly register it online. It is the first project under which online registration is being held. Even Aadhaar is an offline project,” he said.
Labour Minister T P Ramakrishnan said besides being a welfare project, it will also help the government in creating a database of migrant workers in Kerala. “As per a study by an institute, there are around 25 lakh migrant workers in Kerala. But the agencies could not track down the exact number. The project will the government an idea of the number of workers from other states and their personal information,” he said.
Though similar registration attempts were made in the past, they did not succeed. In incidents like the Jisha murder case, the police found it difficult to track down the suspect in the absence of details of Kerala’s migrant worker population. “Since migrant workers frequently change workplaces, the previous project did not succeed. This project is being conducted online and biometric details are being collected, so further registration of a person will not occur,” he said.