The finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday afternoon announced the Atmanirbhar Bharat Rozgar Yojana with an aim to create more employment opportunities as the nation continues to recover from COVID-19 pandemic. The scheme will be operational till June 30, 2021. If establishments recruit employees between October 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021, they will be covered under the scheme for next two years.   

Who will be covered under the scheme? 

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The finance minister explained that new employees will be given certain benefits as part of this scheme. She said that ‘new employees’ would mean workers who were never covered under EPFO previously or lost their jobs between March 1, 2020 and September 30, 2020. The benefits will be extended to workers with salaries less than Rs 15,000 in both the cases.  

What are the benefits of scheme? 

The Central government will provide subsidy for two years in respect of new eligible employees engaged on or after October 1, 2020. It will pay the employer and employee contributions for establishments with up 1000 employees. For establishments with more than 1000 employees, the government will pay employee contribution. The subsidy support will be credited upfront in Aadhaar seeded EPFO account.

Before making the announcements, Union Finance Minister also gave an update on the economy and the measures taken by the Modi government in the last few months to deal with coronavirus pandemic. She said that the bank credit growth is up at 5.1 per cent while markets are at a record high. The finance minister added that RBI is predicting a strong likelihood of economy returning to positive growth in Q3. 

The announcements come right before Diwali, giving major relief to several sectors. The package was formulated after multiple discussions within government and with industry bodies and stakeholders leading upto this week. 

On November 11, the Union Cabinet had approved the Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme for 10 sectors. These are pharmaceuticals, automobiles and auto components, telecom and networking products, advanced chemistry cell batteries, textile, food products, solar modules, white goods, and specialty steel.