IMPRI

On August 26, 2021, the Ministry of Labor and Employment (MOLE) launched the E-Shram, the web portal for creating a National Database of Unorganized Workers (NDUW), which will be seeded with Aadhaar. It seeks to register an estimated 398-400 million unorganized workers and to issue an E-Shram card. However, it has come into existence more than a decade after the passage of the Unorganized Workers’ Social Security Act in 2008; and if we consider inter-State migrant workers, the portal is a little more than four decades late.

The government’s telecom relief package is a lot like cotton candy: there definitely is candy, but there appears to be a whole lot more of it than there actually is. The government could have done more and still should improve upon its effort.