Which State has launched the ‘Rozgar Setu’ Scheme for skilled migrant workers?

Concept — A welfare or employment scheme in India is identified by the government that notifies, funds and administers it, so a State scheme belongs to the State that launched it. In Indian scheme nomenclature the word 'Setu' means 'bridge', so a scheme named with it is a linkage mechanism: it registers one group in a database and bridges them to another. 'Rozgar Setu' therefore describes an employment-bridge scheme — a State-run register of workers that connects them to employers who need exactly those skills.

Application — Rozgar Setu (Rojgar Setu) Yojana was announced by the Government of Madhya Pradesh on 28 May 2020, and its portal rojgarsetu.mp.gov.in was launched on 10 June 2020 by Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan. It answered the reverse migration of the COVID-19 lockdown: the State surveyed skilled workers — masons, carpenters, plumbers, painters, tailors and similar trades — who had returned to Madhya Pradesh after working in industries in other States, recorded each worker's trade, qualification, previous employer and expected wage in the portal database, and matched them with factory owners and with contractors on road and bridge projects inside the State.

Cross-check — the scheme portal sits on the mp.gov.in domain and is administered by the Madhya Pradesh government, which fixes the launching State. The other States in the option set ran employment programmes of their own, under different names and different designs:

• Maharashtra — Mahaswayam (2017) and the MahaJobs industrial employment bureau (July 2020): portals linking jobseekers in the State to industry vacancies.

• Uttar Pradesh — Sewayojan, the State employment-exchange portal, alongside a 2020 skill-mapping drive that recorded the trades of about 30 lakh returning workers.

• Odisha — an urban wage-employment initiative begun in April 2020, later regularised as the Mukhya Mantri Karma Tatpara Abhiyan (MUKTA): it gives paid work days to urban poor households through projects in urban local bodies.

Hence the State that launched the ‘Rozgar Setu’ Scheme for skilled migrant workers is Madhya Pradesh.