The Union finance minister’s Thursday package of measures offered nothing to directly relieve the dire predicament of migrant daily-wage workers, said Pronob Sen, former Chief Statistician and the present chairman of the Standing Committee on Economic Statistics. If their wives have Jan Dhan accounts, then those accounts will be with banks in their villages and not in the cities where they work. The money can help their families but not them. This means that daily-wage workers who are not registered construction workers — and who will therefore be covered by the construction workers relief fund — have been left to fend for themselves. This is because our system has no mechanism for reaching out to such people, said Sen. Nor, it seems, has the government attempted to hastily put one in place.

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