Employers may have to mandatorily enroll unorganised workers on e-Shram

The government is likely to issue an advisory mandating employers to enrol all unorganised workers employed with them on the e-Shram portal.

It would also hold registration camps at industrial and construction sites as it aims to enrol more and more unorganised workers on the portal.

Over 2.7 million unorganised workers have registered on the portal in just 15 days, or 0.18 million everyday on an average. With this pace, the government is likely to enrol an estimated 380 million unorganised workers in the next 220 days.


“A dedicated effort is being made to bring more and more workers under the fold. Mega camps will be organised to enable unorganised workers to walk-into the camps and get themselves registered,” a top government official told ET.

According to the official, the aim is to develop the e-Shram portal as a comprehensive portal with a complete database of all unorganised workers including gig and platform workers, street vendors and others.

As we go forward, the data will be segregated sector-wise so that India has a sense of total number of workers across sectors.

Each individual registering at the portal is eligible for an accidental cover of Rs 2 lakh for a year, the cost for which will be borne by the Centre. Besides, those present on the portal will be the first ones to benefit from all future social sector schemes of the government.

The government, through the labour codes, had intended to provide universal social security to over 450 million workers, out of which 380 million are the unorganised sector workers deprived of any form of social security.

“The creation of a national database of all unorganised workers will help the government in focusing on targeted and last mile delivery of the welfare schemes for the unorganised workers,” minister of state for labour Rameswar Teli said on Thursday.

The workers are being provided a Universal Account Number, which would make it easy for the portability of social security schemes, ration cards etc especially for the migrant workers, Teli said.