All Central Ministries and departments have been requested to fill up the backlog of SC/ST and OBC vacancies by March 31, 2012.

There is a backlog of 77,487 job vacancies, of which 25,560 are for Scheduled Cates, 28,542 for Scheduled Tribes and 23,385 for Other Backward Castes, the Union Labour Minister, Mr Mallikarjun Kharge, informed the Lok Sabha on Monday.

The Minister said that a fresh drive had been launched to fill the backlog.

“It was stipulated that all the backlog vacancies would be filled up by June 2011. However, on review it was found that a large number of backlog vacancies still remained unfilled. Therefore, the drive has been re-launched”, he added.

LABOUR DISPUTES

There were 13, 640 cases of labour disputes pending till July this year with Central industrial tribunal-cum-labour courts. The pending disputes include 93 in Singareni Collieries and eight in Hindustan Machine Tools.

Of the pending cases, the highest number was in Dhanbad I and II (2,450), followed by Ahmedabad (2,057) and Jabalpur (2030).

The cases are pending despite the Government’s move expedite their disposal by holding Lok Adalats as an alternative grievance redressal mechanism, introduced in the Tenth Plan (2002-2007). The disputes include cases referred by the Labour Ministry as well as filed by workers.

CONTRACT WORKERS

Mr Kharge informed the Lok Sabha that there was no provision for regularisation of contract workers under the Contract Labour (Regulation & Abolition) Act, 1970.

In a written reply, Mr Kharge said big companies were adopting various strategies such as ancillarisation, outsourcing and dispersed production network, but there was no specific evidence to suggest that this strategy was being adopted to take advantage of flexibility that smaller firms enjoyed.