Construction labour in Dhamtari

One department, two boards, and the wrong door is easy to walk through

The Chhattisgarh labour department runs the construction board from inside itself — there is no separate BOCW website the way Karnataka or Punjab have one. Everything sits on the department's portal, and the section you want is the one headed भवन एवं अन्य सन्निर्माण, building and other construction.

On the very same portal sits a different body: the Chhattisgarh Unorganised Workers State Social Security Board. Its registration page looks similar, and it is the wrong one for you. You can tell them apart in seconds. The unorganised workers board takes people from fourteen to sixty, asks for an annual income certificate from your ward councillor in a town or your sarpanch or patwari in a village, and applies an income ceiling. Its list of trades is dhobi, tailor, gardener, cobbler, barber, weaver, rickshaw puller, domestic worker, waste picker, handcart puller and so on.

The construction board takes people from eighteen to sixty, asks for a ninety-day construction work certificate, and charges ten rupees. Its list of trades is masons, carpenters, bar benders, stone cutters and the rest.

If you do construction work and somebody registers you with the unorganised workers board, you are not registered for construction schemes and you are not drawing on the construction cess that your own site paid. Say which board you want, in those words, at the district labour office.

The nine points Chhattisgarh publishes, in order

The department's eligibility and procedure page for the construction board is short and unusually specific, so it is worth walking through as written.

A colour passport photograph, and a certificate of ninety days of construction work issued by the employer, the contractor or a registered construction workers' union — scanned and attached, and the page marks this mandatory. Age between eighteen and sixty, with an Aadhaar card, voter ID, marksheet or birth certificate scanned as age proof. A ration card scanned, to establish the permanent and temporary address of yourself and your family members. A mobile number and a bank account number, both mandatory. For MNREGA workers, a job card for fifty days of work.

Then the step people miss. After you have completed the above, you get a message on the mobile number you gave, and you must then go and contact the labour office of your district. The online part does not finish the job by itself — there is a counter visit built into the process, and the SMS is your cue to make it.

The registration fee is ten rupees. The page also says you can get information about registration and about scheme benefits from your district labour office directly, which is worth knowing if the portal defeats you.

And the deadline: the worker registration application will be disposed of within forty-five days of receipt. That is a published commitment with a number on it. If your application has been sitting for three months, you are asking about a service that is overdue, not asking for a favour.

The union certificate and the MNREGA card — two doors most workers never try

The ninety-day certificate is the single thing that stops most construction workers registering anywhere in India, because it has to come from somebody else and that somebody is usually a contractor who does not want to admit he employed you.

Chhattisgarh names three issuers and you only need one of them. Your employer. Your contractor. Or a registered construction workers' union. That third one is a genuine route and it does not depend on the goodwill of the man who owes you money. If there is a registered construction workers' union operating in Raipur, Bhilai or Durg, ask them to issue the certificate; unions do this routinely and will usually walk the application through with you.

The MNREGA line is unusual enough to read twice. The state's published requirement for MNREGA workers is a job card for fifty days of work, not ninety. If you have spent part of the year on rural employment guarantee work and part of it on construction, and your job card carries fifty days, take the card. Almost nobody knows this line exists, and it is on the department's own page.

One honest caution. That page does not spell out how the fifty-day MNREGA route and the ninety-day certificate interact, and it does not publish a renewal or annual contribution rule. Ask both questions at the district labour office and get the answer from the officer rather than from a middleman.

The forty-four trades Chhattisgarh counts as construction

If you have ever wondered whether your work qualifies, the department publishes a list, and it is broad. Recognising yourself on it is the fastest way to stop doubting whether this page is about you.

Stone cutters, stone breakers and stone grinders. Masons and bricklayers. Carpenters, and those who paint and varnish wooden work. Painters. Fitters and bar benders. Plumbers on road pipe repair, drain construction and tap work. Electricians doing wiring, distribution and panel fitting. Mechanics. Well diggers. Welders. Head mazdoors, and mazdoors — reza and coolie. Spraymen and mixermen on road work. Those who pack wood or stone. Divers who clear silt from wells. Hammermen. Thatchers. Blacksmiths. Wood sawyers. Caulkers. Mixers, including concrete mixer machine operators. Pump operators. Mixer drivers. Roller drivers. Khalasis on heavy machinery and bridge work. Watchmen and security guards. Mosaic polishers. Tunnel workers.

And: workers on marble, kadappa stone, slab cutting, polishing and tiles. Road workers. Rock breakers and mine workers. Earthworkers attached to construction. Lime makers. Workers on flood and erosion control. Any other category of worker employed in the construction of a dam, bridge, road or building. Brick kiln, khapra, fly ash and tiles labour. Pandal construction workers. Bansod and kumhar. Workers making cement poles, cement mesh, pots, pipes and tanks. Sand and gravel labour. Workers installing firefighting equipment in construction. Those who fit or repair air conditioners, refrigeration and evaporative units and geysers. And those who make and fit iron grilles, windows and doors.

Note who is on that list and is usually told they are not: watchmen and security guards on site, mosaic and marble polishers, AC and geyser fitters, and grille and window fabricators. If a contractor tells you that you are not a construction worker, this list is published by the Chhattisgarh labour department and you can ask him which entry he thinks you fall outside.

Which website, and a file that will eat your data pack

Chhattisgarh is mid-migration and both generations of its site are live at once, so know which is which before you spend an evening.

The current portal is Shramev Jayate at shramevjayate.cg.gov.in, run by the labour department and hosted by NIC. It is where the current minimum wage booklet, the scheme application form for building and other construction, and the cess payment service live, and the department also publishes a Shramev Jayate Android app. Its construction section loads its content after the page opens, so on a slow connection you may see nothing for several seconds — wait rather than concluding it is broken.

The older pages under ShramAyuktNew are still live and still linked, and they are not junk: the eligibility and procedure page described above, the registration application guide, the registration status and renewal status lookups, the complaint box, and the twelve-kilobyte list of scheduled employments all sit there and all work. What is stale on the old pages is the minimum wage menu, which is dealt with on the minimum wage page.

One practical warning about a link on those pages. The Chhattisgarh BOCW Rules 2008 are published as a single PDF of about two hundred and eighty-seven megabytes. That is not a typing error. Do not tap it on mobile data; it will consume more than most workers' monthly pack and will almost certainly fail halfway. The BOCW Act 1996 next to it is about thirteen megabytes, which is heavy but survivable on wifi. If you need the Rules, ask the district labour office to show you the relevant rule rather than downloading the book.

Silicosis, and why the first two trades on the list matter

Look again at what sits at the top of Chhattisgarh's own trade list: stone cutters, stone breakers, stone grinders. And at entry thirty-one, rock breakers and mine workers. Chhattisgarh is a stone and mineral state, and the disease that goes with that work is silicosis — incurable, progressive, and caused by breathing the dust of crystalline silica.

The state has notified a silicosis scheme that expressly covers organised workers, unorganised workers and building and construction workers, including former workers. That last phrase matters: silicosis often shows up years after the exposure, when a man has already left the trade, and the notification does not shut him out for that.

If you cut, break, grind or drill stone, kerb, tile or concrete, treat a cough that has lasted months, breathlessness, chest pain or unexplained tiredness as a reason to get a chest X-ray, not as dust that will pass. Take the question to your district labour office and to a government hospital, and ask specifically about the silicosis scheme by name.

We do not print the amounts under it. Read the notification and confirm the current figures at the labour office before planning around them.

Where the number lives, and why this document is better than most

The Labour Commissioner's consolidated booklet is on the labour department's Shramev Jayate portal. It is about two megabytes, which is a real consideration on a throttled phone, and it is worth the download because everything is inside one file: the consumer price index notification, the list of scheduled employments, the zone map, both rate tables, and the conditions.

Two things to check on its face. The reference number and date — आठ/न्यू0वे0/श्र0आ0/2026/960, Nava Raipur, 24-03-2026 — and the period the rates are payable for, which the notification states as 1 April 2026 to 30 September 2026 rather than leaving you to infer it. Chhattisgarh revises every six months, on 1 April and 1 October, so when you next open the file, check that the window printed inside it covers today.

One technical quirk. The booklet's text layer uses a legacy Devanagari font mapping, so if you copy text out of it you get apparent nonsense — the words for minimum wage come out as Latin letters. The file is not corrupt. Read it as a picture, and do not trust anything that claims to have extracted its figures by machine.

Schedule ख or Schedule ग — the two facing pages that differ by a seventh

This is the most valuable paragraph on this page and it is worth more than any rate.

The booklet carries two rate tables, one after the other. Schedule ख is headed for the forty-five scheduled employments of Part One — that is the one construction sits in, and it is yours. Schedule ग is headed for daily-wage workers and employees working in the various government departments. Different people entirely.

Both tables show the same monthly basic wage and the same monthly dearness allowance for each category. What differs is the daily figure, and it differs because of the divisor. Schedule ख works the day rate out by dividing the month by twenty-six. Schedule ग divides by thirty. Same monthly wage, two different day rates, and the government daily-wage column is roughly a seventh lower.

They sit on facing pages of the same document, with identical-looking layouts and the same four category names down the side. A contractor reading the wrong one — or choosing the wrong one — pays a construction worker off a table written for somebody else. If your day rate looks low, check which schedule the number came from before you argue about anything else.

Here is the difference in rupees, on the unskilled row for Zone अ in the current window. Both tables show the same monthly basic of ₹8,320 and the same monthly dearness allowance of ₹3,082, totalling ₹11,402 a month either way. Schedule ख divides by 26 and prints a day rate of ₹439. Schedule ग divides by 30 and prints ₹380. That is ₹59 a day, every day, or roughly ₹1,534 over a twenty-six day month — taken from a worker who is on the right monthly wage and the wrong daily one.

The rule to carry: if you work in building or other construction work in Chhattisgarh, you are on Schedule ख, headed for the forty-five scheduled employments of Part One, and the twenty-six divisor is the one that applies to you. Schedule ग is headed for daily-wage workers and employees of government departments. If the heading above the table you are being shown mentions government departments, it is not your table.

Construction appears twice on the schedule, and there is a rule for that

Appendix अ of the booklet lists the forty-five scheduled general employments. Construction is not one entry on that list; it is two, and several more sit around it.

Entry 8 is employment in building and other construction work. Entry 16 is employment in the construction and maintenance of roads, or in building and construction works. Nearby: entry 9 is stone crushing, entry 10 is stone grinding and breaking, entry 11 is brick kilns, entry 12 is lime kilns, entry 13 is tile manufacture, entry 15 is cement poles and cement products, and entry 18 is the construction and maintenance of irrigation works.

So the obvious question is which one you are on, and Chhattisgarh answers it in the explanation appendix, in one line that is worth memorising: where the same nature of work is done in more than one employment, the better rates are payable to the workers employed.

That is a genuinely strong provision and it settles the argument in your favour. You are not obliged to accept the lower of two entries that both describe your work. If you lay road kerbs and also do building work, or if you crush stone on a building site, look at both rows and take the better one.

If you want the employment list on its own without downloading the whole booklet, the department publishes it as a separate file of about twelve kilobytes. That one opens on anything.

Three zones, and Raipur sits in the top one — along with sixteen kilometres around it

Chhattisgarh splits its rates by zone, and unlike some states the definitions are precise enough to settle a dispute on site.

Zone अ is the highest. It covers the area inside the municipal corporation limits of Raipur, Durg, Bhilai, Bhilai-Charoda and Birgaon, and the area up to sixteen kilometres beyond those corporation limits. It also covers all industrial areas and industrial development centres in the state, the Atal Nagar and Raipur development authority area, and every factory in the state licensed under the Factories Act, 1948 for three hundred or more workers.

Zone ब covers the area inside the municipal corporation limits of Rajnandgaon, Bilaspur, Korba, Raigarh, Ambikapur, Jagdalpur, Chirmiri and Dhamtari, and the area up to eight kilometres beyond those limits.

Zone स is everywhere else — everything not falling in Zone अ or Zone ब.

The sixteen-kilometre ring is the sentence to remember, because it is where sites actually are. A township going up on the highway outside Raipur, or on the Durg-Bhilai stretch, is very often still inside Zone अ even though it does not feel like a city. Before you accept a lower zone's rate, ask how far the site is from the corporation boundary — and note that if your site is inside a notified industrial area, or attached to a factory licensed for three hundred or more workers, it is Zone अ wherever it stands.

Read the right half of the table, and how the number is built

Inside each schedule, the table shows two half-years side by side. The left block is the previous window, 1 October 2025 to 31 March 2026, and it has expired. The right block is the current window, 1 April 2026 to 30 September 2026. Both are printed in full, both look official, and a reader who takes the first set of numbers his eye lands on takes the expired ones. Read the column headings before you read the figures.

How the figure is built is simple enough to follow. The basic rates for the Part One scheduled employments were revised by labour department notification F 10-4/2016/16 dated 29 March 2017, and linked to the All-India Consumer Price Index for industrial workers at 271 points — the average for January to June 2016, on the 2001 equals 100 series. On top of that basic sits a variable dearness allowance, worked out on the average six-monthly rise above that linking point at a per-point monthly rate fixed in the 2017 notification, and revised every six months.

Your legal floor is the basic plus the dearness allowance, for your zone and your category, from the current half-year block of Schedule ख. The booklet prints that total for you in its own column, so you do not have to add anything up.

For 1 April 2026 to 30 September 2026, those Schedule ख totals are as follows, and the dearness allowance inside every one of them is the same — ₹3,082 a month, ₹118.54 a day — because it is a flat amount rather than a percentage.

Unskilled: Zone अ ₹11,402 a month and ₹439 a day, on a basic of ₹8,320 and ₹320.00; Zone ब ₹11,142 and ₹429, on ₹8,060 and ₹310.00; Zone स ₹10,882 and ₹419, on ₹7,800 and ₹300.00.

Semi-skilled: Zone अ ₹12,052 and ₹464, on a basic of ₹8,970 and ₹345.00; Zone ब ₹11,792 and ₹454, on ₹8,710 and ₹335.00; Zone स ₹11,532 and ₹444, on ₹8,450 and ₹325.00.

Skilled: Zone अ ₹12,832 and ₹494, on a basic of ₹9,750 and ₹375.00; Zone ब ₹12,572 and ₹484, on ₹9,490 and ₹365.00; Zone स ₹12,312 and ₹474, on ₹9,230 and ₹355.00.

Highly skilled: Zone अ ₹13,612 and ₹524, on a basic of ₹10,530 and ₹405.00; Zone ब ₹13,352 and ₹514, on ₹10,270 and ₹395.00; Zone स ₹13,092 and ₹504, on ₹10,010 and ₹385.00.

Two things about those daily totals are worth knowing. They are rounded — ₹320.00 basic plus ₹118.54 allowance is ₹438.54, and the booklet prints ₹439, because its own rule rounds fifty paise and above up to the next rupee. And every one of them is printed in the document, so you are never quoting arithmetic of your own: you are quoting the Labour Commissioner's column.

When you next open the file, check the window on its face before you use any of this. These figures expire on 30 September 2026 and Chhattisgarh revises every six months, on 1 April and 1 October.

The four categories are unskilled, semi-skilled, skilled and highly skilled, and the booklet does something useful: it publishes the general definition of each. Broadly, unskilled is simple work needing little or no independent judgement or prior experience; semi-skilled is routine work of a fixed kind where the important decisions are taken by others; skilled means working with proficiency, exercising independent judgement and carrying responsibility, with complete and detailed knowledge of the trade; and highly skilled means full proficiency in technical and specialised work, with a technical degree or diploma. If a contractor is putting you a category below where you work, those definitions are the ground to argue on.

The conditions in the explanation appendix — the half most people skip

Appendix ब of the booklet is where the rights are, and Chhattisgarh's are good.

A day's wage from a monthly wage is the monthly wage divided by twenty-six. That is stated in the first paragraph, and it is the same divisor Schedule ख uses.

The job types shown in the classifications are examples and not an exhaustive list, and a worker of a class not included in the notification gets the same minimum wage rate as a worker doing work of the same nature. So "your trade is not on the list" is not a reason to pay you less.

Where the wages already being paid are higher than the revised minimum, introducing the notification cannot be used to reduce them — they shall not be brought down in any case.

Compliance is tested on the total. If what an establishment pays exceeds the notified basic plus the dearness allowance taken together, it is treated as complying; if the total it pays falls short of the notified total, the worker is entitled to the difference. That cuts both ways and it is the right test to insist on: compare totals, not components.

The notified rate already includes the remuneration for the day of rest, as contemplated by section 13 of the Minimum Wages Act, 1948. Nobody is doing you a favour by counting your weekly off.

On piece work, the piece rate must be constructed so that it is not less than the minimum wage fixed for eight hours a day and six days of work with one day's paid leave. So a piece rate that leaves you below the daily minimum for a full week's work is not lawful merely because it is a piece rate.

And a small one that adds up: in fixing wages, fifty paise or more is rounded up to the next rupee and less than fifty paise is dropped.

The Chhattisgarh page that stops in 2020

The department's older portal still carries a minimum wage menu, it is still linked, and it still works. It lists rate notifications for 01/10/2015, 01/10/2016, 01/04/2017, a revised 2017 notification, 01/04/2018, 01/10/2018, 01/04/2019, 01/10/2019 and 01/04/2020 — and then it stops. Six years of silence, with nothing on the page to say the series moved to the new portal.

It is more honest than most stale pages, because every entry prints its own effective date, so a careful reader can see that the newest thing there is from 2020. But a hurried one takes the last item on the list and treats it as current, and a 2020 rate in 2026 is a serious underpayment.

The habit is the same as everywhere. Never take a rate because it is the newest thing on the page you happen to have found. Open the document, read the period printed inside it, and satisfy yourself that period covers today. Chhattisgarh makes that easy — its current booklet states its own start and end dates on the face of the notification.

If you are being paid below the floor, write it down first: the site, the contractor's name and number, the dates and hours, and what you were paid. Then raise it once, plainly, naming the schedule and the zone. Many small contractors in Raipur and Bhilai are working from an old booklet and will correct it. If that fails, take the record to your district labour office — the same office that handles your registration — and the department also runs an online complaint facility on its portal.