ORGANISING THE UNORGANISED

The Centre is working on integrating all welfare schemes, including those of state govts, into the e-Shram portal for the benefit of unorganised sector workers

- SHIVA RAJORA

On October 21, India's labour ministry integrated different social security schemes with the e-Shram portal in a bid to provide seamless access to government welfare programmes to over 300 million unorganised sector workers, who are already registered on the portal.

The "One Stop Solution" facility entails consolidating and integrating data from various central ministries and departments into a single repository. The move follows an announcement made by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman during her Union Budget speech earlier this year to facilitate delivery of a wide array of services to labourers, including those for employment and skilling, with a comprehensive integration of the e-Shram portal with others.

Currently, the portal has integrated data from 12 central welfare schemes such as "One Nation One Ration Card", "Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act", "Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana - Gramin", "National Social Assistance Programme", "National Career Service", and "Pradhan Mantri Shram Yogi Maandhan", among others.

Unified database for easy welfare access Launched in August 2021 in the aftermath of the migrant workers' crisis during the Covid-induced lockdown, the e-Shram portal is a pan-India database of unorganised workers, including both skilled and unskilled. The portal registers details such as name, occupation, address, educational qualification, and skill type of each worker.