Despite Centre's continued push, fresh registrations on e-shram portal fall

Despite the Centre’s continued push for registering unorganised workers on the National Database of Unorganised Workers (NDUW) or the e-shram portal, the pace of fresh registrations has slowed down significantly. This is being attributed to the absence of a clear methodology while assigning targets to states and lack of incentives to woo workers to register themselves. 

The labour ministry had lau­nched the portal in August 2021 for creating a national database of an estimated 380 million unorganised workers, which included agricultural wor­kers, domestic wor­k­ers, construction workers, gig and platform wor­kers, etc. The central government had provided the states with targets at the beginning of the project in August 2021 to prepare the database, which will capture details su­ch as name, occupation, address, educational qualification, skill type etc.

After registering 270 million unorganised workers between August 2021 and March 2022, only 11.7 million workers were registered in 2022-23 against a target of 50 million. Data sourced from Lok Sabha shows that as of 27 March, 2023, only Uttar Pradesh (124.7 per cent), Odisha (102.7 per cent) and Chattisgarh (100.4 per cent) have achieved the registration target given to them in the same period.   

Telangana (38.5 per cent), Tamil Nadu (38.6 per cent), Maharashtra (39.3 per cent) and Karnataka (39.8 per cent) have the least number of registrations.  
 

Officials that Business Standard spoke to in various labour departments pointed out the lack of a clear methodology while assigning the targets to states, which has led to huge shortfalls in achieving them. 

“The targets given to states were loosely based on the employment and unemployment survey done by the Labour Bureau, way back in 2014, which couldn’t give a clear picture of the situation in 2021. Moreover, states like Karnataka and Maharashtra are recipient states in terms of workers. Hence, a large number of workers get registered in their home-states, thus leaving a shortfall in the target in these industrial states,” officials from Maharashtra said.  

“Considering the shortfall, multiple letters were sent to the central government to either revise the target downwards or share the methodology, which was used while arriving at the figure. However, the response to them is still awaited,” another official from the Delhi labour department added. 

Meanwhile, labour economist KR Shyam Sundar says that the main reason for plateauing of registrations is the lack of any welfare measure provided to the workers. 

“Earlier, e-shram card holders were entitled to get an accidental insurance benefit. Like any other scheme, it needs direct welfare to accrue for someone to woo them to register. Moreover, the portal seeks a range of information from the workers about their profession, which sometimes acts as a deterrent for them to register as they fear losing some other welfare, which they might be getting under some other  scheme like the construction worker welfare schemes,” he added.