India: Employee Rights/ Labour Relations

The Indian government has raised the mandatory wage ceiling for Employees' Provident Fund Organisation coverage from INR 15,000 to INR 25,000 per month, a change that will bring more than five million...

There is a practice so entrenched in Indian public administration that it has become almost invisible. A government body needs workers. Instead of following the constitutionally mandated process of open recruitment, it hires on contract, daily wages, or ad hoc terms. Years pass. Sometimes decades. The worker performs the same duties as a regular employee, sits at the same desk, reports to the same officer, and keeps the institution running. On paper, however, they remain ‘contractual’. No pension. No provident fund. No job security. No career progression.

For years, Indian professionals on temporary assignments in the UK faced a quiet but costly problem: paying into two social security systems for the same job, with no additional pension benefit to show for it. That changed on 15 July 2026, when the India-UK Double Contributions Convention (DCC) came into force alongside the broader Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), finally addressing what officials on both sides had long acknowledged as a sunk cost for mobile talent.