In June 2026, the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI)’s SDG Progress report noted that social protection coverage in India nearly tripled from 22% (2016) to 65.3% (2026). This increase in coverage was attributed to workers’ registration across schemes such as Ayushman Bharat, Atal Pension Yojana and e-Shram. Since 2021, India registered over 315 million unorganised workers on the e-Shram portal- a national database designed to link informal workers to welfare schemes and social protection.
The numbers have been widely celebrated in policy discourse as a sign of formalisation, a process by which workers gain social security benefits, legal recognition, enforceable labour protections and meaningful ability to exercise rights. If accurate, this would represent the largest and fastest formalisation exercise in history. However, as Shalini and Shalaka argued, while e-Shram has been a step forward in creating the worker’s identity within the system, it has fallen short on delivering the benefits this digital identity is meant to unlock. For workers like Bipin, a migrant construction worker in Najafgarh, New Delhi, registration without access to benefits delivery ultimately is a hollow promise.
“We were told the card would get us benefits… but it was just another hollow promise. This is another empty card sitting in my wallet.”
In 2025, the Indian Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance asked the Ministry of Labour whether formalisation leads to sustained income security, social protection, and long-term employment. The Ministry’s reply was telling: e-Shram data, it said, “may be used” and “might offer insights.” Three hundred and fifteen million registrations, but whether any of it has changed workers’ lives remains unknown.
Across the world, digital registration has been promoted as a way to extend state reach and administer protections at scale. What began as a tool to connect informal workers to rights and protections has quietly shifted into a metric of formalisation in its own right. It offers legibility, scalability, and political convenience, the ability to point to the scale of unorganised workers, but it tells us very little about whether workers’ lives have actually changed.
The Promise of Scale
The e-Shram portal was born in a moment of crisis. During COVID-19, images of migrant workers walking hundreds of kilometres home, without income, without shelter, invisible to every system meant to protect them, forced a genuine reckoning. This led to the creation of e-Shram, the world’s largest database of unorganised workers’, which aimed to link workers to social security.
For a country where over 90% of its workforce is informally employed, this was not a minor administrative achievement. It was, on its own terms, a breakthrough.
But the success of scale is not the same as the success of impact.
A Map Without Roads
Our recent paper, published in Global Social Policy, shows that e-Shram emphasised enrolment into digital systems without engaging with the deeper structural conditions that produce workers’ vulnerability. The portal produced a remarkable map of informal labour. The roads to the accompanying rights and benefits remain unbuilt.
We call this narrow formalisation: a form that prioritises governance legibility over socio-economic transformation, making workers visible to the state without formalising the conditions of their work.
The distinction matters. Women workers who registered found no corresponding labour law to activate. Migrant workers still could not access benefits across state lines. Workers over 60 could not register at all. Some workers, assuming e-Shram replaced existing welfare boards, withdrew from schemes they were already entitled to, losing protections in the very act of seeking new ones.
Informality is not a single condition that a registration card can solve. As ILO Recommendation 204 recognises, it is a bundle of rights deficits: the absence of employment contracts, missing social security, no legal recognition, no labour protections, and no bargaining power. Formalisation that addresses only one thread, registration, does not untangle the rest. It just makes the rest harder to see.
From Designing Around Workers to Designing with Them
The distance between registration and rights is not just a technological problem. It reflects an absence of the right voices in design, the worker organisations and grassroots collectives who knew these workers long before any portal did.
Registration required an Aadhaar card, a linked bank account, and a functioning mobile number. For many workers, at least one link in that chain was broken. Many lacked smartphones or internet access, women disproportionately so.
Civil society organisations, NGOs and grassroots collectives stepped in to help workers navigate the registration process. The majority of e-Shram registrations were completed through intermediaries. The state built the portal, but the intermediaries improved its accessibility.
However, these same organisations remain largely absent from where policy was designed. Decisions about eligibility, occupational categories, and scheme integration are made by the state, for the state’s purposes. Worker organisations are essential to reaching workers at the last mile and institutionalising their space within the system.
India Is Not Alone
India’s experience is not unique. It is an especially visible instance of a pattern playing out across the world. Digital platforms claim to formalise gig work without formalising its conditions. Social protection systems create eligibility on paper without substantive benefits in practice. Wherever formalisation is measured in enrolment figures rather than in whether workers’ lives have materially changed, the same gap opens.
When governments and worker organisations gathered at the International Labour Conference in June 2026, a central question was how to create structures of genuine dialogue that bring workers’ voices into the design of formalisation, not just its delivery. The tripartite architecture that ILO Recommendation 204 insists upon has remained conspicuously absent from formalisation design in many countries. That absence is not a glitch. It is a democratic deficit.
Three Things That Need to Change
Formalisation is not a light switch. It is a long-term, politically negotiated process. As states like India move to study the relationship between digital registration and formalisation, three things need to be changed:
- From counting to measuring change: A registration database is infrastructure and should not be treated as a proxy for formalising workers’ conditions. The state now needs to examine whether registered workers can actually access benefits, improve working conditions, or stabilise their earnings over time.
- Ensure Portability of benefits: e-Shram emerged from a promise of ensuring welfare for migrant unorganised workers. While migrants are now registered on the portal, their actual rights remain stationary. Digital registries must be used to enable portability.
- Treat worker organisations as Institutional partners, not delivery agents: Workers’ collectives and CSOs have been critical to making e-Shram function on the ground. They now need a formal role in institutionalising workers’ voices within the system.
Beyond a Card in the Wallet?
Bipin’s card still sits in his wallet. It exists. It has his name on it. What it has not done is change the conditions of his work, his access to social protection benefits, or his power to negotiate the terms of his employment.
That is the distance between registration and rights. Closing it requires more than better portals or higher enrolment targets. It requires treating formalisation as what it actually is: not an administrative event, but a political commitment to the people the system is supposed to serve.