A database for social safety
e-Shram was launched in August 2021 to register the nation’s estimated 400 million casual staff as a way to channel social help to them. A lot of them – street-sweepers, home assist, every day waged laborers – misplaced their jobs within the cities in the course of the Covid pandemic and needed to return to their villages.
“As a result of we didn’t have any repository of them,” mentioned Rawat, “we didn’t know what number of of them may avail the social safety advantages. We weren’t capable of learn how many may really shift from the casual sector to the formal sector. So, step one was to create this repository.”
This is able to show to be a mammoth job.
In India, a casual employee is usually somebody employed with no formal contract, regulated working circumstances or entry to social safety advantages like a pension scheme or medical health insurance. They make up about 82% of the nation’s workforce, based on the India Employment Report 2024 by the Institute for Human Improvement and the Worldwide Labour Group (ILO).
Manoj Kumar Saxena, senior director (IT) at Nationwide Informatics Centre, Ministry of Electronics and Data Expertise (MeitY), was tasked with getting the e-Shram platform up and working inside a month. The challenges had been manifold.
“The federal government wished to … deal with these individuals who immediately didn’t have any jobs,” he mentioned. “It thought, we should always use expertise to offer these individuals a digital identification and advantages.”
His group had to determine the easiest way to get and confirm primary info like title, date of delivery, gender and handle utilizing Aadhaar nationwide identification numbers and cell numbers. Additionally they had to make sure that the e-Shram system may deal with registering a whole lot of thousands and thousands of staff, all whereas preserving the safety of these private particulars.
“We wished to have scalability, reliability and safety, and that’s the reason we had been on the lookout for MeitY-accredited hyperscale cloud amenities. Therefore, we opted for Microsoft Azure,” Saxena mentioned, explaining the selection of cloud platform.
At its peak, he mentioned, e-Shram was processing 172,000 transactions per second and dealing with as much as 8 million registrations a day.
Instruments like Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure VM Scale Units and Azure Cosmos DB, amongst others, enabled the platform to deal with such excessive volumes with low latency.
Microsoft Azure’s in-built encryption capabilities, coupled with Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Azure Firewall and Azure Entrance Door, assist guard the platform and safe its information.
In the meantime, reaching out to 400 million casual staff, lots of whom are itinerant and poorly educated, took grunt work and extra expertise.
Key to this outreach had been the greater than 450,000 widespread companies facilities, or CSCs, dotted throughout the nation that had been set as much as ship last-mile digital companies. At these facilities, staff get assist keying in particulars like their title, Aadhaar quantity and particulars of their training and expertise to finish their registrations.
Registering on e-Shram, by way of telephone or pc, has been made simpler with the mixing of Bhashini, the federal government’s AI-powered language platform, which can be hosted on Microsoft Azure and offers real-time translation in 22 native languages.
As soon as registered, staff can see what social safety advantages they’re eligible for. To this point, e-Shram boasts greater than 310 million staff in its database, and hyperlinks to 18 welfare packages allotting help similar to accident insurance coverage, public housing, medical subsidies and farming grants. This effort contributed to India’s widening social safety protection, which grew from 24% in 2019 to 64% in 2025, based on the ILO.
Shifting to the formal sector
Having guided casual staff to register on e-Shram, the labor ministry is now concentrating on higher jobs for them.
In 2022, India’s nationwide employment platform NCS was built-in with the e-Shram platform, giving casual staff entry to jobs and employers throughout the nation. It additionally gives them profession counselling and coaching programs, which may result in securing formal sector work that comes with medical health insurance or retirement financial savings by way of the federal government’s Staff Provident Fund Group.
Up to now, about 17.8 million of the employees registered on e-Shram have signed on to NCS. NCS itself has about 150 million individuals registered on the portal. “Shifting them in the direction of the formal sector was the subsequent plan of motion,” mentioned Rawat.
She listed different options the ministry plans to roll out on these platforms, together with AI chatbots to information staff registering on e-Shram or creating their resumes on NCS, and a location supervisor on the cell app in order that staff can seek for jobs inside their neighborhood. These measures make jobs extra accessible for the deprived.
“The large portals usually goal the Tier-1 cities… We try to focus on the Tier 2 and tier 3 cities,” Rawat mentioned.
For Kumar, these options solely speed up his plans.
“I’ve to do loads of issues in life,” he mentioned. “I’ve to advance my profession and enhance my wage. I additionally wish to research.”
Future plans
With e-Shram and NCS changing into “one-stop options” for all issues associated to profession and jobs, there are larger plans in retailer.
Knowledge from these platforms can inform labor coverage, serving to the nation match talent units and coaching to future jobs, mentioned Rawat. She cites the scarcity of plumbers in Germany for example.
“Let’s say we have to transfer our plumbers from India to Germany,” she mentioned. “We must always perceive what sort of expertise they require, and we will present that talent. As soon as these unorganized staff get that talent, they’re entitled to go overseas for that exact job.”
Rawat additionally hopes these platforms will finally eradicate unscrupulous job brokers, in order that India’s staff could be recruited and employed safely at house and overseas. For staff abroad, the Ministry of Exterior Affairs makes use of its personal digital instruments, such because the eMigrate portal.
“e-Shram is built-in with the eMigrate portal, and now we have registered companies attempting to get the fitting individuals overseas,” she mentioned.
There are even plans to supply e-Shram and NCS as digital public infrastructure and digital public items to different nations.
“We showcased each portals in Geneva, and it was appreciated by varied nations,” mentioned Rawat, referring to the Worldwide Labour Convention in June 2025.
“It’s large work the nation is doing.”
High picture: e-Shram was launched to register the nation’s estimated 400 million unorganized staff. Photograph by Selvaprakash Lakshmanan for Microsoft
