The maintenance of labor registers of about 5.85 crore establishments in agriculture and non-agriculture sectors has been simplified. These registers are related to details of employees, their salaries, loans/recoveries, attendance etc. By doing away with overlapping/redundant fields, the number of these registers would get reduced from 56 to only 5. This will help these establishments to save cost and efforts and ensure better compliance with Labour Laws.  An intention notification was issued on 4th November 2016 for reducing the number of registers/data fields and the same was widely circulated to Ministries / Departments concerned, State Govts., other stakeholders besides placing the same in public domain. In effect, all previous registers envisaged under various Acts / Rules have been omitted and replaced with only 5 common Registers. Such an exercise has reduced the number of data fields in 5 registers to only 144 from the then existing 933 fields in 56 registers. Ministry of Labour & Employment has also simultaneously undertaken to develop a software for these 5 common Registers. After the development of the software, the same will be put on the Shram Suvidha Portal of the Ministry of Labour and Employment for free download with an aim to facilitate maintenance of those registers in a digitized form. The Labour Laws under which these registers are maintained include:  (i) The Building and Other Construction Workers (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act, 1996 (ii) The Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970 (iii) The Equal Remuneration Act, 1976 (iv) The Inter-State Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act, 1979 (v) The Mines Act, 1952 (vi) The Minimum Wages Act, 1948 (vii) The Payment of Wages Act, 1936 (viii) The Sales Promotion Employees (Conditions of Service) Act, 1976 (ix) The Working Journalists and Other Newspaper Employees (Conditions of Service) Act, 1955