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* The Payment of Wages (Amendment) Bill
The Honourable Dr. B. R. Ambedkar (Labour Member): Mr. Deputy President, I move :
“That the Bill further to amend the Payment of Wages Act, 1936, be referred to a Select Committee consisting of Seth Yusuf Abdoola Haroon, Mr. Muhammad Hussain Chaudhurv, Mr. Lalchand Navalrai. Mr. A. C. Inskip, Sir Vithal N. Chandavarkar, Mr. N. M. Joshi, Dr. Sir Ratanji Dinshaw Dalal, Mr. D. S. Joshi, and the mover, and that the number of members whose presence shall be necessary to constitute a meeting of the Committee shall be five.”
Sir, the Payment of Wages Act, to which the present Bill proposes to make certain amendments, was passed in the year
- This Bill, at the time when it was passed, was recognised as an experimental measure for the simple reason that when the Bill was drafted we had not before us any model piece of legislation on which we could have modelled the measure which is embodied in this Act. We have had now an experience of practically six years of this measure and in the course of the working it has been discovered that the Bill suffers from many defects. If I may tell the House, it has been pointed out that there are practically 30 or 40 amendments which it is necessary to make to improve the Payment of Wages Act. The government of India realise that at present they have not got the time to devote to all the amendments to the measure which different parties have suggested and consequently they do not propose to engage themselves upon improving the Act and to remove all the defects that have been suggested. What the Government of India proposes to do through the present amending Bill is to take certain defects which are of such administrative importance that unless and until those defects are removed, it will be difficult to administer the measure with the intention which lay behind the act when it was passed.
*Legislative Assembly, Debates, Vol. V, 16th November 1944, pp. 889-92.