New Delhi’s parliamentary halls echoed with urgent calls for labor justice as TMC’s Derek O’Brien took the Rajya Sabha floor. Zero hour turned into a platform for his crusade against low wages and jobless youth, proposing ‘UMANG’ as the panacea for India’s working poor.
With stark stats, O’Brien revealed that every third young person in the country idles without work, education, or skills training. Even employed workers grapple without wage floors, their incomes frozen at pitiful 176 rupees daily for a decade. This wage stagnation, he argued, crushes consumer spending and perpetuates poverty.
Envisioning a game-changer, he pitched a universal minimum wage enforceable by law across all boundaries – no exceptions for gig workers, informal sectors, or regions. Dubbed ‘UMANG’, it promises a baseline income security for all.
His roadmap was precise: enforce a nationwide mandatory wage, tie it to rising costs via yearly updates, streamline categories to ease business adherence, and blanket coverage for every worker category imaginable.
Switching gears, AAP’s Sanjay Singh targeted the Agniveer recruitment model, branding it a ‘scam’ on patriotic youth. He lamented how 1.3 lakh Army hopefuls and 7,000 Air Force qualifiers from recent years remain jobless, their dreams shattered.
Drawing from personal encounters, Singh narrated Harinder Yadav’s plight – a soldier wannabe reduced to servitude. ‘The army is India’s pride; don’t tarnish it with such deceit,’ he roared, urging an overhaul to honor genuine aspirations for national service.
These Rajya Sabha exchanges signal escalating political heat on economic inequities and defense policies, with opposition MPs demanding systemic overhauls to safeguard vulnerable youth.