Beedi and Cigar Workers

In one line

Beedi and cigar may be made only in licensed industrial premises, the licence lasts five years and can be refused on grounds including the applicant's finances and whether the application is benami, and yet a worker given raw material to roll at home is outside the prohibition altogether.

In exam wording: section 74 of the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020 forbids the use of any place as industrial premises for making beedi or cigar without a valid licence under section 119, prescribes the application, the five matters to which the authority must have regard, a five year validity, renewal at least thirty days before expiry with deemed continuance, and cancellation or suspension after a hearing; section 75 gives an appeal to the authority under section 119(6); section 76 permits wetting and cutting of leaves outside the premises with the State Government's permission and otherwise prohibits manufacture outside them, with a proviso for a worker given raw material to make beedi or cigar at home; and section 77 excludes the owner or occupier of a private dwelling house working with his own family.

Why the law has this at all

Beedi rolling is the largest home based manufacturing trade in India, and almost everyone in it is a woman working in her own room with tobacco, leaves and thread supplied to her by someone she may never meet.

That structure defeats ordinary labour law. There is no factory gate, no muster roll, no shift and often no employer who will admit to being one. The Beedi and Cigar Workers (Conditions of Employment) Act 1966 was Parliament's attempt at the problem and its method was to licence the premises, so that the trade could be found at all. Section 143(1)(g) of this Code repeals that Act and Part V carries the method forward.

The method is worth naming because it is unusual in this Code.

Everywhere else the Code attaches to a person or an undertaking. An establishment registers under section 3; a contractor is licensed under section 47; a factory is approved and licensed under section 79.

Here the licence attaches to a place. Section 74(1) forbids an employer to use or allow to be used any place or premises as an industrial premises without a licence, and forbids the use of the premises otherwise than in accordance with the licence.

And because the licence is for a place in which the health of the workers depends on how the business is run, section 74(4) lets the authority look at things a licensing authority is not usually allowed to weigh: the applicant's previous experience, his financial resources including his capacity to meet labour welfare demands, whether the application is benami, and the welfare of labour in the locality and the interest of the public generally.