Like most women in her village, Manju Gameti is the head of her household, while her husband has migrated to the city for work. She belongs to Suthar Madra, a tribal-dominated village in Udaipur district in southern Rajasthan. With her husband away, she has her work cut out, she takes care of their crops, and for half of the month, she is employed under MGNREGS (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme). For the last few months, she has been working to mobilise more than a hundred women in her village to register on the
e-Shram portal. She takes them to the nearest Common Service Centre (CSC), a kiosk for digital assistance, where they can register free of cost. She is not aware of what the benefits of registering might be, but she thinks it is vital for women to access welfare from the government, and if something were to happen to her husband. The e-SHRAM card with its 12-digit unique number could be her ticket to security.
The e-Shram portal is the first national database of unorganised workers in the country, which represents 92 percent of the workforce. It started in August last year, in response to the migration crisis of 2020, when tens of thousands of workers walked back to their homes. The crisis brought out the lack of social security and accurate data on unorganised workers, based on which the Supreme Court directed the government to create a database.
Any worker, aged between 16 and 59 and working in an unorganised sector is eligible to register, this includes migrant workers, construction workers, MGNREGA workers, agricultural workers, domestic workers, street vendors, gig and platform workers, ASHA, and Anganwadi workers, amongst others.
The portal aims to register 380 million, which according to the
Economic Survey (2019-20) is the estimated number of unorganised workers in the country. Although, the unorganised workforce in India is believed to be larger than the government’s estimate. According to a
report by Azim Premji University from 2021, the size of the informal workforce is close to 415 million.
Any worker, aged between 16 and 59 and working in an unorganised sector is eligible to register, this includes migrant workers, construction workers, MGNREGA workers, agricultural workers, domestic workers, street vendors, gig and platform workers, ASHA, and Anganwadi workers, amongst others. The government has described it as the identification of the “nation builders” of India.
The database is the first step toward a necessary and overdue objective, the inclusion of neglected categories of informal workers, and to bring them under the ambit of social and digital welfare. The portal claims all social security benefits of unorganised workers will be delivered through it, and the database may be utilised to provide necessary assistance to unorganised workers in emergency and national pandemic like situations. Despite the promise of expanding social security coverage for marginalised workers, it remains to be seen how this will be achieved.
More women than men have registered
Since the launch of the portal, one trend has remained constant, more female than male workers have been registering on it. According to the latest
figures shared by the Ministry of Labour and Employment, as of March 2022, more than 270 million workers have registered, out of which nearly 53 percent are female and 47 percent are male.
The registration by women is higher in each of the top five states on the e-Shram dashboard; Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, and Odisha. Tamil Nadu (61.88), Meghalaya (66.04), and Kerala (59.58) have the highest registrations of female workers.
The portal provides insights on the age of the workforce, which is predominantly young, and their financial precarity—nearly 62 percent of workers are in the age group of 18–40, almost 250 million of the 270 million who have registered so far earn INR10,000 per month and below.
In both Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, agriculture has the highest registrations, followed by domestic and household workers, construction, and apparel—sectors which have a large presence of the female workforce. The portal provides insights on the age of the workforce, which is predominantly young, and their financial precarity—nearly 62 percent of workers are in the age group of 18–40, almost 250 million of the 270 million who have registered so far earn INR10,000 per month and below.
Women’s work has been invisiblised in all these sectors. According to a 2018
report by National Council of Applied Economic Research, women constitute 42 percent of the agricultural labour force of the country, with increasing feminisation of agriculture, and yet they own less than 2 percent of farm land. Similarly, women make up the significant majority of domestic workers in India, almost
75 percent. They have no legal protection as workers under labour laws and are dependent on their employers. The portal does well by recognising categories like domestic workers and giving them an identity.
Why are women driving the surge in registrations?
When the portal was launched, it was feared that women will be left out because of the sharp digital divide between men and women. Less than 3 out of 10 women in rural India and 4 out of 10 women in urban India have ever used the Internet, as the
fifth National Family Health Survey revealed. Yet that has not been the case, even though the numbers for self-registrations are expectedly lower, the registrations have been largely driven by common service centres, which provide digital services at the grassroots level.
Higher registration by women could be a positive sign. In India, a higher percentage of women workers are part of the informal economy compared to men—94 percent of women workers are in the informal sectors. The uptake by women contradicts what we know of women’s participation in the workforce in the country, which has fallen to a historical low, as the
last round of Periodic Labour Force Survey confirms.
Since the portal requires Aadhaar-linked mobile number and bank account for self-registration, there have been reports on how it could end up excluding the most marginalised amongst the workforce.
There is a need to understand what is driving this trend. It will be instructive to look at why there are more women on the portal once the registration target of 380 million is achieved (if the status remains the same), but some of the underlying causes may remain consistent over the next few months. One of them could be intervention by grassroots organisations that work closely with women’s groups in both rural and urban areas. It is easier to mobilise women through institutions and collectives than men, many of whom work as migrants in cities.
Ambiguity on social benefits
The portal collects data on details such as name, occupation, address, educational qualification, skill types, and family details. However, it has not been successful in collecting information on migrant workers, which was its mandate in the first place. The majority of registered workers have reported they are not migrants. Since the portal requires Aadhaar-linked mobile number and bank account for self-registration, there have been
reports on how it could end up excluding the most marginalised amongst the workforce.
One of the persistent questions about e-Shram has been on the ambiguity on what will happen after the data has been collected. Apart from providing a minor amount as accidental insurance (INR 200,000) for registered workers, there is no clarity on how the registry will expand social and security benefits for workers. Even then, for most of the invisible workers of India, especially women like Manju Gameti, it represents the hope of being counted.
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