PIB Trackere-Shram turns five with 31.89 crore registrations
The unorganised workers' database now carries 31.89 crore registrations, 54.28 per cent of them women, and routes fifteen welfare schemes behind a single Universal Account Number.
What happened
- The e-Shram portal completes five years on 26 August 2026.
- Registrations stand at 31.89 crore as on 18 August 2026.
- Women are 54.28 per cent of registrants and men 45.72 per cent.
- The One-Stop Solution integrates 15 social security and welfare schemes.
- About 11.5 lakh gig and platform workers are now on the database.
For Prelims
- e-Shram: launched 26 August 2021 by the Ministry of Labour and Employment, developed by the National Informatics Centre.
- What it is: the first Aadhaar-authenticated National Database of Unorganised Workers (NDUW), issuing each worker a 12-digit Universal Account Number.
- Who counts: a home-based, self-employed or wage worker in the unorganised sector, plus an organised-sector worker who is not a member of EPFO or ESIC and not a government employee.
- Statutory root: that definition comes from the Unorganised Workers' Social Security Act, 2008, which the Code on Social Security, 2020 subsumes.
- Eligibility: any unorganised worker aged 16 and above, not an income-tax payer and not an EPFO or ESIC member; registration is free and needs Aadhaar plus a mobile number.
- One-Stop Solution: launched 21 October 2024, carrying 15 schemes — PM-SYM, PMSBY, PMJJBY, NSAP, ONORC and PMAY-Gramin among them.
- Benefit values: PMSBY pays ₹2 lakh for accidental death or permanent disability and ₹1 lakh for partial disability; PMJJBY pays ₹2 lakh for death from any cause; PM-SYM assures ₹3,000 a month from age 60.
- The profile: 55.21 per cent are aged 18-40; the largest States are Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra; most registrations come through Common Service Centres.
For UPSC: The registry that makes the unorganised workforce legible to the state — and the only place an official gig-worker count exists. Use it for social security architecture, portability of benefits and data-first welfare delivery.
What it is NOT: e-Shram is not a benefit or a pension in itself — it is a database and a gateway. A worker still has to enrol in each scheme, and registration alone transfers no money.
For Mains
Syllabus: GS2.12 · GS2.15 · Linkage L1
Anchor
India's welfare problem for unorganised workers was never eligibility, it was identification — e-Shram is the state trying to see 31.89 crore people it could not previously count.
Substantiation (data)
31.89 crore registrations in five years, 54.28 per cent of them women, with 15 welfare schemes routed through one Universal Account Number.
Exemplification
About 11.5 lakh gig and platform workers registered — the first official count of a workforce that had no statutory existence before the Code on Social Security, 2020.
Problematisation
A database is not a benefit, and most registrations came through Common Service Centres rather than from workers themselves, which says something about who can reach the platform unaided.
Way-forward
Convert registration into automatic scheme enrolment, so that presence on the database triggers entitlement rather than merely enabling it.
Position
The government's stated position is convergence — one identity, many schemes, with API-based data sharing as the delivery mechanism.
Deploys into: Welfare of vulnerable sections + e-governance (GS2.12, GS2.15) · social security for unorganised and gig workers, portability of benefits and digital welfare registries.
PIB Backgrounder · 2026-08-25 · PRID 2303053 · PIB source ↗