e-Shram: Database of Unorganized Sector Workers
What is e-Shram?
- E-Shram is a portal that is to serve as a database of unorganized sector workers in India.
- It was launched by the Ministry of Labour and Employment.
- The government seeks to register some 38 crore workers from the sector- including construction workers, migrant workforce, domestic workers and street vendors.
- Under this initiative, the workers are issued an e-Shram card bearing a 12 digit unique number. This is to help their inclusion in social security schemes.
- The registration work is coordinated among the Labour Ministry, state government, trade unions and common service centres.
- Registration on the portal can be done using Aadhaar number and bank account details. The process also collects information like date of birth, mobile umber, social category and home town.
- It also collects information about the occupations in which the workers are engaged.
- A national toll free number was launched to address the workers’ queries.
- Awareness campaigns are also included in the plans.
What is the current state of the project?
- About 1/5th of the estimated number of unorganized sector workers are now registered in the database.
- In terms of coverage, Odisha leads with 87% of its unorganized workers already registered in the database. Other top states are West Bengal, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Bihar.
- According to preliminary snapshot of the database:
- Category-wise breakup:
- 40.5% of the workers are from the OBC category
- 27.4% are from the general category
- 23.7% of the workers are from the Schedule Caste category
- 8.3% of the workers are from the Scheduled Tribe category
- Occupation-wise breakup:
- Agriculture sector with 53.6%– the maximum registration
- Construction sector with 12.2%
- Domestic and household workers with 8.71%
- Category-wise breakup:
Why is it significant?
- During the pandemic-driven lockdown in 2020, the migrant labour crisis exposed the shortcomings of India’s social security architecture.
- The key reasons for the limited policy support for this vulnerable section- especially during a period of acute economic stress are:
- Lack of credible data on the migrant workforce
- Inability to quickly identify the migrant workforce
- The crisis showed that this dearth of data extended beyond the migrant workforce and encompassed the entire unorganized sector workforce.
- This unorganized sector labour-force accounts for some 90% of the country’s entire labour force.
- The type of information revealed even by the preliminary data is vital given that some sectors have been hit worse than others by the pandemic’s fallout.
- This information could help the government tailor schemes to cater to those sectors that have borne the brunt of economic dislocation.
What is the way ahead?
- The information, gathered on the workers need to be regularly updated. This is especially needed in case of migrant workers.
- This needs to be done by the states of origin and the states of destination. This will help keep track of the migration pattern.
- There is a need to incentivize registration to cover those who are reluctant to register themselves.
- Several schemes have eligibility criteria that depend on data that isn’t collected by the portal. These too must be integrated.
- Need to examine the issue of portability of benefits, extended at both levels- central and states.
- The e-Shram initiative is a welcome move and is a long overdue step in the right direction.
- This is a necessary step to put a social security structure in place for a large section of India’s workforce.
- The database is set to be linked to Unnati– a proposed platform for matching labour with employment demand. This will further address the difficulties faced by the unorganized sector workers.
Conclusion:
The e-Shram initiative is a much needed step. However, the mere creation of a database isn’t sufficient. The government needs to identify and register the workers. This is necessary for their inclusion in social security schemes and for making India’s social security architecture robust.
Referred Sources
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