A Civil Society Agenda for E-Shram
On August 26, 2021, the Union Minister for Labour and Employment launched e-Shram, a national database portal for the targeted delivery of social security entitlements to India’s unorganized workers. Despite constituting over 93% of India’s workforce, unorganized workers have been left out of social protection nets. This category of workers, including platform and migrant workers, also face innumerable employment-related vulnerabilities in urban settings, which have been heightened in recent times by the economic shocks of the Covid-19 pandemic.
As an initiative that seeks to tackle the deep precarity and dearth of protection for unorganized workers, e- Shram is a welcome step. Just three months after the launch of the portal, close to 10 crore unorganized workers have registered as per official statistics.1 However, the experiences of unions and workers’ organizations on the ground have been marred by glitches in its technical infrastructure,2 a stark digital divide and limited digital literacy.3 The digital delivery of welfare also invites legitimate scrutiny about workers’ privacy and data rights.
In a strategy meeting held on September 29, 2021, the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) and IT for Change sought to enable a dialogue among trade union representatives, researchers, practitioners working on informal sector issues, and digital rights activists on their experiences with using the portal, along with the impediments they and their constituents have faced during this process. The list of participants is enclosed in Annexure 1.
Many of the issues discussed at the meeting continue to affect the efficiency of the roll-out of e-Shram. Therefore, this report, in addition to crystallizing discussions at the meeting, highlights challenges that actors on the ground have faced, and proceeds to outline a broad set of recommendations from civil society organizations for the Ministry of Labour and Employment, Government of India, on how to strengthen the design and implementation of the e-Shram portal.
Click here to read the full report.
