The 2020 migrant crisis was one of the worst catastrophes in modern Indian history. The sudden imposition of the lockdown in March 2020 severely impacted employment and, consequently, the earnings and savings of migrant workers. With no proper employment opportunities in their home villages, the household income of return migrants fell by 85 per cent during June-August 2020. Migrants in the destination states began to return and walk back to their home states, causing a large wave of distressed return migration across the country. With widespread return migration and a lack of data on interstate migrants, the government faced challenges in providing COVID-19 relief and social security benefits to vulnerable groups.  

The e-Shram portal was envisioned as a one-of-its-kind initiative by the central government to fill the data gap for migrants and unorganised workers. It also aims to improve access to social welfare and welfare entitlements by bringing all unorganised workers under one umbrella. We cover the inception of the e-Shram portal and whether the initiative has successfully centred migrants in its process. 

What is e-Shram?

On June 29, 2021, the Supreme Court, in a suo moto writ petition took cognisance of the plight of migrant workers during the COVID crisis. It directed the Central Government "to develop a portal for registration of unorganised labourers/migrant workers". It told the central and state governments that "the registration process of the unorganised labourers/migrant workers be completed at the earliest, but no later than 31.12.2021." Following this, the Ministry of Labour and Employment, Government of India launched the e-Shram portal on August 26 2021. The portal has a mandate of registering 38 crore unorganised workers in the country to create an Aadhar- seeded National Database of Unorganised Workers (NDUW). The portal aims to bridge the gap in unorganised workers' access to social welfare and employment benefits by issuing an e-Shram card (or Shramik card) upon registration. This card assigns each worker a unique 12-digit number.

Who Can Register on e-Shram?

The objective of the e-Shram portal is to create a centralised database of all unorganised workers. The e-Shram website  classify them as "any worker aged between 15-69 years, who is a home-based worker, self-employed worker or a wage worker in the unorganised sector, including a worker in the organised sector who is not a member of the Employees' Provident Fund Organisation/Employees' State Insurance Corporation or not a government employee." As per the guidelines on the e-Shram portal, workers require an Aadhar number, mobile number linked with Aadhar and savings bank account number to complete the registration.  

The portal offers both online and offline registration routes. Workers can register through online self-registration or offline common services centres (CSCs), worker facilitation centres, and State Seva Kendra. The self-registration process on the e-Shram portal is available in English and Hindi and requires an Aadhar-linked mobile verification to begin the process. 

What is happening on ground?

There are significant barriers to the online self-registration mode. The digital divide, discrepancies in Aadhar linked mobile authentication and language barrier are a few. Due to this, workers rely on offline service providers such as CSC's, Seva Kendras and CSO's for registration. The e-Shram portal is only available in Hindi and English. It acts as a significant barrier for informal workers who might not be proficient in either of the languages; hence, dependence on digital service providers is high in terms of authentication and registration. 

Chalo Network, an initiative at IMN to provide last-mile financial, identification and health-related services to low-income migrant households, has also been providing e-Shram registration services in source regions like Madhubani (Bihar) and Shivpuri (Madhya Pradesh). Similar E-Shram registration efforts have been made by CMID and Haqdarshak across states in India to enable worker registration.  

The operations of Chalo Network in the source regions have highlighted that 50% of customers don't have mobile numbers linked to their Aadhar; hence, workers depend on biometric (fingerprint) verification through CSCs for the e-Shram registration. The linguistic and technological barrier of the portal also deters self-registration.  

Informality and Migrant Workers

The e-Shram portal defines unorganised workers as inclusive of construction workers, migrant workers, gig and platform workers, street vendors, domestic workers, agriculture workers, etc.. It is the first to systematically bring these categories of workers under a centralised system. However, the category of migrant worker stands out, since it is indicative of a person who has moved to another destination for work, and not an occupation in itself. Migrant workers work across different unorganised sectors such as construction, agriculture, and domestic work. 

According to Dr Ravi Srivastava in India Spend, "The registration system was mandated by the Supreme Court judgement which was aimed at registering circulatory migrants, but thee-Shram portal captures migration data if the migrant is a semi-permanent migrant and is confined to one location only." In its current form, the portal does not have questions that could capture data on short-term migrants who often change their occupations after each migration journey. Dr Srivastava's previous works also discuss how short-term migrants disproportionately comprise socio-economically marginalised communities, like Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Classes. The short migration cycle disqualifies them from any social security benefits at the destination – adding another layer of precarity. Therefore, it is imperative to be cognizant of the nature of migration while recording migrant data, which the E-Shram portal fails to do. Further, the current E-Shram dashboard also falls short in disaggregating data across the vertical of migration. For this data registration to enable granular insights into the nature of migration and the related vulnerabilities, there is a need for the data set to represent more granular data on demographic and occupational details about migration.

Who is A Migrant?

The IMN team navigated the e-Shram self-registration process to understand how it captures data on migrant workers. The form requires applicants to provide their current address details and a permanent address. Given that there is no explicit question regarding the migrant status of an applicant, we deduce that the estimation of migrant registration is based on cross-referencing the current and permanent address as provided, similar to the data collection on migration in the Indian Census. This process is complex and the Registrar General of India stated that "generation of migration data requires Computer-Assisted Coding of relevant information which is time-consuming."

Assuming that e-Shram is similarly collecting migration data as the Census, will it provide robust data on migrant workers who are always on the move? Will a migrant worker have to update their current address with each new destination constantly? If yes, it will be costly for the worker (both in terms of time and money). In the absence of any incentive, it will be challenging to motivate the workers to undergo an update process.

Our field interventions at Chalo Network also reiterate that generating e-Shram cards for free is not a very tangible incentive to drive workers to get themselves registered. How are the benefits under E-Shram different from those provided by the government already? Are there any cash transfers post-enrollment? These are some of the questions that the field team is confronted with daily, suggesting an apparent lack of communication and fuzziness around scheme coverage.

There seems to be ambiguity in the definition of a migrant itself concerning the e-Shram portal. According to this tweet by @CSCegov, the official Twitter handle of Common Services Centres, the e-Shram registration defined a migrant worker "to be a person who is employed in an establishment or has come on his own to another state and draws wages not exceeding Rs. 18,000 per month." The portal has publicly available data on the number of domestic workers who have registered but nothing on migrant registrations. In November 2021, the government released the data on migrant registrations and according to Business Standard, only 3% of registrations until early November were by migrants. However, data on the proportion of registered workers who are migrants are no longer visible on the e-Shram dashboard. With no exemplary data on migrants available, the definition of a migrant as per the e-Shram portal remains unclear. A clear definition and granular information on the nature and flows of migration derived from the captured data set is needed. The states and CSO's can thereby utilise this information on migration and aid effective last-mile welfare delivery in their respective states. Currently, it is unclear if each state has access to publicly available disaggregated E-Shram data on migration for their respective states. 

Scheme Coverage & Gaps: Formal Schemes, Informal Workers

The e-Shram portal aims to improve social security services to unorganised workers by integrating the welfare provisions provided by the Ministry of Labour and Employment and other ministries. The e-Shram website currently lists 12 social security and six employment schemes, all pre-existing welfare entitlement programs. The only benefit available to workers directly after e-Shram registration is the accidental insurance coverage of 2 lakhs through the Pradhan Mantri Suraksha Bima Yojana.. The remaining schemes enlisted on the website all have their eligibility requirements, and currently, the e-Shram portal collects data on the monthly income slab of workers, and the income certificate is not a mandatory field.

Conclusion: Centring Migrants in the Portal Requires Work

The e-Shram portal is an important step towards streamlining social security benefits for informal workers and developing a nationwide database on unorganised workers to ensure their social protection. There are, however, significant steps needed to improve the current registration process and the scheme coverage for workers. While registering on the portal is now viewed as a step toward formalisation, one should seriously question this assumption. Noting the compounded vulnerability migrants face in India, migrants' experiences of informality are located across multiple vertices in the migration life cycle.  

CSCs can play a significant role in bridging the digital divide when registering on the the e-Shram portal. Given its mandate, the e-Shram registration needs to account for the dynamic nature of migration in India and collect data that can automatically qualify migrants for social security. This kind of data collection will ensure the portability of benefits for workers on the move. The Union Labour minister said, "After the All-India Survey of migrant and domestic workers is completed, the data shall be linked to the e-Shram portal". If it happens, linking such large-scale data to the e-portal will be an interesting development in the e-Shram. However, the survey questionnaire is not yet out in the public domain. Will this new survey employ the same data collection protocol as the Census for calculating migrants? 

There are 450 million internal migrants in India, and most of them are unorganised/informal workers. For e-Shram to centre migrants in India, a crucial step would be to incorporate the holistic definition of migrants in all the government schemes and portals. It will be crucial to mainstream migration in India's development and policy work. The Supreme Court's judgement centres on migrants by stating that they are "one of the groups severely affected by the pandemic." Is the e-Shram portal addressing the concerns of the Supreme Court in spirit? As of now, we think the answer is 'No'. 

At India Migration Now, we #mainstreammigration. Our aim is to mainstream migration in India's development ecosystem. We want every policymaker, journalist, ministry, and other decision-makers to have a natural reflex to centre migrants in their work.