The State government has decided to bring in reforms in the norms pertaining to inspections being conducted on industrial establishments under various labour laws to facilitate ‘Ease of Doing Business’ in the State. The Labour department has decided to make sure that there will be single joint inspection under all the labour laws to avoid any duplication in accordance with the Business Reform Action Plan.
Industrial units would be categorised as low/medium/high risk depending on the number of workers employed, and inspecting officers will be allocated randomly for computerised risk assessment based inspections.
Accordingly, units which employ less than 30 members are categorised as low risk, those with 31 to 100 employees as medium risk and the units with more than 101 workers in different levels will form part of the high risk category.
The frequency of inspections for establishments under low risk will be once in five years, once in three years for establishments under medium risk and it will be two years for those under the high risk category.
An officer of the rank of Assistant Labour Officer would be delegated powers to inspect low risk units, assistant labour commissioner for medium risk and deputy labour commissioner rank officer would inspect the high risk units.
The entire system would be online as part of the centralised inspection agency encompassing compliance inspection system of the Labour, Factories Boilers and Telangana State Pollution Control Board.
Inspections will forthwith be conducted as per a well-defined procedure and the checklist for inspections would be published on the web portal of the department.
The inspection would be applicable to establishments covered under 13 labour laws, including Central laws like Payment of Wages Act, 1936, Factories Act, 1948 and Minimum Wages Act, 1948.
Exemptions
The department had also decided to exempt certain establishments from the compliance inspections including those categorised as low risk unless any complaint is received against these units. Units covered under the Telangana Shops and Establishment, Medical Transport Workers Act, Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act and others would be presumed to be satisfactorily complying with the labour laws unless any complaint is received against them.
Star Hotels, IT and IT enabled Services units, export processing zones units, export oriented units bio-tech units, tourism promotion units (irrespective of number of workers) would also be exempt from the compliance inspections as also the units categorised as low risk opting for self-certification scheme. Units which are categorised as startups as defined by the Department for Promotion of Industries and Internal Trade would be exempt from inspections for the first year of setting up upon submission of an online self-declaration.
If these units continuously submit their Integrated Return/Returns specified under different Acts without fail, they will be exempted from compliance inspections for a further period of four years from the second year onwards.