March 19, 2020, the central government plans to provide unemployment benefits to a section of organized workers who have lost their jobs due to the coronavirus epidemic. This will be in line with the measures taken by countries like the US to deal with the impact of the epidemic on the working population.
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The government’s ‘Atal Beema Vyakti Kalyan Yojana’ that provides unemployment insurance to workers subscribing to the Employees State Insurance (ESI) scheme will cover such workers during the coronavirus epidemic. ESI is a self-financing health insurance scheme for formal sector workers in India that is managed by the Employees State Insurance Corporation (ESI).
Atal Beema Vyakti Kalyan Yojana
Under the scheme commissioned from July 2018, the laborers who are unemployed get compensation in cash for 3 months of unemployment. But the workers can avail of this benefit only once in their lifetime.
Under the scheme, workers get cash up to 25 percent of the average salary received in the last two years of their job. However, an important condition for workers to get the benefit of unemployment is that they should have been a customer of ESI for at least two years. When the scheme was made effective in July 2018, about 1 million workers were eligible under it.