L. A. DEBATES (CENTRAL) QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 585
those necessary curtailments we have been able to give Labour certain big advantages. Thus under the Essential Services Maintenance Ordinance workers must stick to their jobs. Simultaneously this ordinance guarantees men in essential industries fair terms of employment. Provision has had to be made to ensure the best use of the technical personnel, but here too statutory provision ensures their conditions of service being fair. So also while strikes without notice have been made illegal, adequate provision has been made for adjudication and power taken to enforce the results of such adjudication.
While therefore some restrictions have been imposed on Labour, there has been a development of Government’s powers to ensure fair conditions of employment, the influence of which is likely to survive.
Another matter in which developments resulting from the war are bound to have a lasting effect are the training schemes of the Labour Department and the novel experiment of sending skilled workers to England for further training. The Bevin Boys whose period in England has given Indian Labour an insight into English working class conditions and organisations, have themselves benefited by the training to such an extent that they now on the average earn two and a half times their former salaries. The scheme for training raw hands in India which will train 70,000 skilled workers by June 1943, must have even greater result:, as this large increase in the skilled labour force of the country must be of the greatest value to India’s post-war industrial revival.
Coming to our new Labour Welfare organisation, the best indication of the spirit which animates the Department is the choice of a Labour Welfare Adviser made by my colleague, the Honourable Sir Firoz Khan Noon. Mr. R. S. Nimbkar has been a labour leader all his life. He has been in and out of prison constantly in the cause of Labour. His work for the Bombay Girni Kamgar Union, one of India’s biggest unions, has shown his capacity as an organiser of workers, while he has served his home town and India as a member of the Bombay Municipal Corporation and as a delegate to the International Labour Conference where he was one of a team led by Sir Firoz Khan Noon. We are fortunate to have him now as a Government worker and you may be sure we will use his services to the utmost. So successful has been his work so far that we have now appointed seven Assistant Labour Welfare Officers to help Mr. Nimbkar. For the past three or four days these new Labour Welfare Officers have been here in Delhi in the Labour