The Cine-Workers Welfare Fund Act, 1981

What it does

The Act provided for the financing of welfare measures for cine workers, meaning persons employed in or in connection with the production of a feature film. It created a welfare fund, held by the Central Government, and the fund was applied to measures such as medical care, education of workers' children and group insurance. A welfare administrator and an advisory committee ran it.

The money came from a levy. A companion statute, the Cine-Workers Welfare (Cess) Act, 1981, imposed a cess on feature films, which was paid into the fund.

The Act is a repealed instrument. The Code on Social Security, 2020 subsumes it along with a group of other social security statutes, and the labour codes were brought into force on 21 November 2025. The page is therefore about a statute whose provisions govern past periods and pending matters only as the Code's repeal and savings provisions allow.

Who it binds

The Act's obligations fell on producers of feature films, who paid the cess, and on the administration of the fund. Its benefits ran to cine workers, a class defined by reference to employment in film production and not by the form of contract. A worker engaged through a contractor, or on a film-by-film basis, could still be within it.

What moved out of it

The scheme is now carried by the Code on Social Security, 2020, which treats welfare of this kind as one of the social security schemes the Central Government may frame. The Social Security (Central) Rules, 2026, made on 8 May 2026, are the central rules under that Code. The firm's note on the cost of the labour codes states that the Central Government notified final rules under all four codes on that date.

What has changed, and when

The Act dates from 1981. Its replacement came with the commencement of the labour codes on 21 November 2025. This page does not state the transitional provisions of the Code, which decide how a pending claim or an unpaid cess for an earlier period is handled, and a person with such a matter should check the Code's repeal and savings provision.

What turns on it in practice

The Act is named on the site's page for employment advisory work, as one of the statutes an employer in the entertainment and media sector would have met. For a production company the questions now are two. The first is the older one: whether any cess or contribution for periods before the Code remains unpaid, and under which instrument a demand for it would be made. The second is how the Code treats film workers going forward, because the classification of a worker as employee, contract worker or gig worker decides which of the Code's schemes reaches that person.

The labour codes changed the cost side of employment generally. The firm's note on what the labour codes cost an owner explains where the largest changes sit, and a production house that engages large numbers of short-term crew should read it with the Social Security Code in mind.