Centre to fast-track enrolment of unorganised workers on e-Shram

The Centre is looking to fast track onboarding of unorganised sector workers on e-Shram portal, which provides a universal account number (UAN) to unorganised sector workers and supports them with skilling and employment initiatives.

The labour and employment ministry has initiated discussions with other central ministries dealing with weavers, handloom workers, fishermen and fisherwomen, toddy tappers, leather workers, plantation labourers and beedi workers, and state governments, and has called a meeting with all stakeholders on April 4, a senior government official told ET.

"The idea is to integrate all the scattered data on the Aadhaar-authenticated e-Shram portal, do away with duplication of data and firm up the data so that India has an exact number of unorganised workers, verified by Aadhar," the official said.


The move comes ahead of the Lok Sabha elections to be held from April 19 to June 1. It is anticipated that the new government, which will be formed in June, could unveil some form of social security benefits for unorganised sector workers or roll out the long-pending Labour Codes, and data from the portal will come handy.

Since 2023, the labour ministry has been linking data from different schemes with e-Shram data to identify e-Shram registrants who have not yet received the benefits of these schemes.

The portal, launched in August 2021, has 295 million unorganised workers as on date with average daily enrolment of 20,000 workers. The government had estimated the country's unorganised workforce at 370 million at the time of the launch of the portal. Agricultural workers constitute more than 50% of the total registrations at 154.2 million, followed by domestic workers (28.4 million), construction workers (26.5 million), and workers in the apparel sector (18.7 million). The data captured on the portal include name, occupation, address, educational qualification, skill types and family details of every unorganised worker registered on the portal, helping the government to track the impact of the existing central and state social sector schemes on them.