ESIC relaxes conditions for women to avail sickness benefit

Mumbai: The Employees State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) on Tuesday took important decisions such as relaxing contributory conditions for insured women to avail sickness benefit and setting up more hospitals, for improving the delivery of services for insured persons under its health insurance scheme.

The decisions were taken during ESIC’s 184th meeting held under the chairmanship of Minister of State for Labour and Employment Santosh Kumar Gangwar, the ministry said in a release.

“The Employees’ State Insurance Corporation (ESIC), during its 184th meeting held on February 22, under the chairmanship of Santosh Kumar Gangwar, Minister of State for Labour and Employment (Independent Charge) has taken several significant decisions to improve its service delivery mechanism and to strengthen the medical infrastructure benefiting its insured workers,” the Labour Ministry said in a statement.

After the enhancement in the duration of maternity benefit to 26 weeks from 12 earlier, in some cases, insured women were not eligible to avail sickness benefit in the corresponding benefit period after availing of maternity benefit. This is because the mandatory contributory conditions of minimum 78 days were not met being the insured women under receipt of maternity benefit and leave.

In such cases, it has now been decided that an insured woman will be qualified to claim sickness benefit in the corresponding benefit period if the contribution in her respect were paid or payable for not less than half the number of days available for working in such a shorter contribution period, it said.

The ESIC has decided to construct a 300-bed hospital, including 50 super-speciality beds at Haridwar, Uttarakhand. The ESIC has also decided to construct a 350-bed hospital at Vishakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh. It has also decided to establish a negative pressure ICU (intensive care unit) at ESIC Super Specialty Hospital & Medical College at Hyderabad, Telangana.

Besides, around 25 other agenda items pertaining to improvement in service delivery mechanism were also considered and approved, the release said.