From October 1, the Employees’ State Insurance (ESI) scheme will apply across the whole of Gujarat. The Union Labour Ministry issued the notification on September 25 under Section 29 of the Code on Social Security, 2020, UNI reported, bringing 15 districts into the scheme for the first time and widening coverage in 16 more.
State Labour Minister Kunvarji Bavaliya put the gain at 8 to 10 lakh additional insured workers, according to IANS (via SocialNews). An ANI report from last week gave the same order of magnitude, about eight lakh.
Which districts change
The 15 districts entering the scheme are Amreli, Aravalli, Banaskantha, Botad, Chhota Udepur, Dahod, Dang, Devbhumi Dwarka, Gir Somnath, Kutch, Mahisagar, Narmada, Patan, Tapi and the newly carved Vav-Tharad. Until now, a factory worker in Botad or a warehouse hand in Gandhidham fell outside ESI even if they met every other condition, because their taluka had never been notified.
The other 16 districts, including Ahmedabad, Surat, Rajkot, Bhavnagar, Jamnagar, Junagadh, Mehsana, Morbi and Porbandar, already had ESI in designated industrial pockets. The notification extends it to their entire area, which matters for units that set up outside the old GIDC and municipal boundaries: ceramic clusters around Morbi, food processing on the edges of Rajkot, textile units in Surat’s outer villages.
What an insured worker gets
ESI covers employees in establishments with ten or more workers earning up to Rs 21,000 a month. The employer pays 3.25% of wages and the employee 0.75%, per ESIC’s published rates. Workers on very low daily wages pay nothing themselves.
In return, the worker and dependants receive cashless treatment at ESIC dispensaries, hospitals and empanelled private hospitals, plus cash payments during sickness, maternity leave and disability. For a family in Dahod or Dang that currently pays out of pocket for a hospital stay in Vadodara, that is a real change.
The state’s figures show the scale. Gujarat had about 21.68 lakh insured persons and roughly 84 lakh beneficiaries as of March 31. The government expects close to 32 lakh insured workers and around 1.2 crore beneficiaries once the new districts register.
The hospital gap
Coverage on paper helps only if a dispensary or panel hospital sits within reach. Gujarat has 103 ESIC dispensaries and 11 ESIC/ESIS hospitals, per the minister’s statement, and has empanelled 234 community and primary health centres. The state says it added 68 hospitals to the panel over the past two months, 13 government and 55 private.
Most of the new building sits in the industrial belt. A 350-bed hospital at Sanand and a 150-bed hospital at Kalol in Gandhinagar district are under construction. Halol and Savli are to get 100-bed hospitals once land is allotted, and Mehsana, Gandhidham and Morbi have proposals on file. Saurashtra gets an administrative boost: ESIC has approved a sub-regional office in Rajkot to handle registrations, contributions and claims for 12 districts in the region.
Several of the newly covered districts, among them Dang, Tapi, Narmada and Chhota Udepur, are tribal districts with few large employers and thin private hospital networks. Workers there will rely on empanelled government health centres for the foreseeable future.
What employers and workers should do
- Employers in the 15 new districts with ten or more staff will need to register on the ESIC portal and begin deducting and depositing contributions for October wages.
- Workers should check that their employer has generated an ESI number (IP number) for them and added family members, since benefits depend on that registration.
- Units in the 16 partially covered districts that sat outside the old notified areas face the same obligation from October 1.
What to watch
The first test comes with the October wage cycle, when registrations in the new districts start to show up in ESIC numbers. The second is whether the promised hospitals at Halol, Savli and Mehsana move from land allotment to construction. Until they do, a newly insured worker in north Gujarat will still travel to Ahmedabad for specialist care.
Sources: UNI, ANI via Asianet Newsable, IANS via SocialNews, ESIC
This report was compiled and written with AI assistance from publicly reported sources, and reviewed for accuracy.