12 government schemes have been linked with eShram.
By consolidating support into a single platform, the Ministry of Labor and Employment intends to simplify the process of availing these benefits.
The Indian government is set to launch a significant initiative for 30 crore unorganised sector workers, including those employed in small shops, households, and on contracts. Union Minister of Labor and Employment, Mansukh Mandaviya, will introduce the ‘eShram – One Stop Solution’ today, October 21.
This programme aims to streamline access to various social welfare schemes and benefits for unorganised workers across the country. By consolidating support into a single platform, the Ministry of Labor and Employment intends to simplify the process of availing these benefits, ensuring better support for this large workforce segment.
The upgraded portal, also known as eShram 2.0, is aimed at unorganised workers, who number around 30 crores. It aims to effectively integrate the information of beneficiaries of all social security and welfare schemes of these workers through a single platform. In this, 12 schemes of various central ministries and departments have been linked with eShram.
The Ministry of Labor has instructed aggregators to register unorganized workers on the e-Shram portal to generate unique IDs for them. These IDs will help identify the number of platform workers across India, facilitating the creation of guidelines to extend social security benefits to them. Currently, India has around 20 million platform workers. A senior official previously noted that the upgraded e-Shram portal will specifically aid in offering social security coverage to these workers once they are registered. This initiative is a key step in ensuring that the growing platform workforce receives adequate protection and access to government schemes.
Along with this, the central government is also preparing to give a big financial security gift to the gig workers. Union Minister Mansukh Mandaviya has said that a policy is being made to provide the benefits of pension, health insurance and other social security to gig workers working on work-based payment. According to Niti Aayog, it is estimated that there are 65 lakh workers associated with gig activities and online platforms in the country.