New Delhi: The government said on July 9 that it would put in place a new arrangement for taking care of pensioners, reform and update existing legislations to address emerging labour market developments and strengthen Employees Provident Fund (EPF) organisation to cover more workforce.

"With the breakdown of the traditional social structure of the joint family, policy formulations for alternative arrangement must be put in place as early as possible as only 3.5 crore of the estimated 40 crore workers in the country were covered under the formal scheme of old age income provisioning," Labour Minister Sahib Singh Verma said.

In his opening remarks at the meeting of the Central Board of Trustees (CBT) of EPF, Verma said that "growing contractualisation and casualisation" of the labour force was causing alarm as jobs that were traditionally in the formal sector were now being outsourced, relocated and contracted out."

"This has led to a negative growth in the formal sector and a positive growth in the unorganised sector," the new Labour Minister said adding that it was in this context that the decades-old Laws needed to be reformed and updated to adequately address the developments in the labour market.

Neither the present legislation nor the present delivery systems were adequate to meet the challenges which the country faces, he said adding that both these needed to be improved to meet the national imperative of closing the gap of social security provisioning which on July 9 stood at an alarming 90 per cent.

PTI