New rules by the government in the special economic zone!!

The department of commerce under the commerce ministry of the Indian government has notified a new rule on Tuesday, July 19 under 43A of Special Economic Zones Rules, 2006.

Notification-

• Work from home will be allowed in special economic zones (SEZs) for a maximum period of one year.
• Work from home provision may be extended to a maximum of 50 percent of total employees including contractual employees.
• The flexibility granted to the Development Commissioner (DC) of SEZs to approve a higher number of employees (more than 50 percent) for any bonafide reason to be recorded in writing.
• In respect of SEZ units whose employees are already working from home, the notification has provided a transition period of 90 days to seek approval.

Reason of establishing new rule-

The notification was issued on demand from the industry for making a provision for a country-wide uniform Work From Home (WFH) policy across all Special Economic Zones.

There were several rounds of discussions with various stakeholders before firming up the notification.

The work from home rule in India came after the Netherlands passes a law establishing home working as a legal right and became one of the first countries to enshrine such flexibility in the law.

Employees under this rule-

The new rule provides work from home for a certain category of employees of a unit in SEZ, that is-

1. Employees of IT/ ITES SEZ units.
2. Employees, who are temporarily incapacitated.
3. Employees, who are traveling.
4. Employees, who are working offsite.

Execution

The SEZ unit will be responsible to provide equipment and secured connectivity to those employees working from home under the new rule.

“SEZ Units will provide equipment and secured connectivity for the purpose of WFH to perform authorized operations of the units and the permission to take out the equipment is co-terminus with the permission granted to an employee”.

Functional SEZ’s 

The work-from-home rules are applicable to Special Economic Zones, which are areas subject to a set of different economic regulations than other regions within India. This is done to attract foreign direct investments.

There are eight functional SEZs in India at the moment including —

1. Santa Cruz (Maharashtra),
2. Cochin (Kerala),
3. Kandla (Gujarat)
4. Surat (Gujarat),
5. Chennai (Tamil Nadu),
6. Visakhapatnam (Andhra Pradesh),
7. Falta (West Bengal) and
8. Noida (Uttar Pradesh).