People familiar with the matter said on Sunday that the Union government is expected to launch a digitised platform for migrant workers this week, allowing authorities to direct state-run benefits to them and intervene during crises. This comes after a Supreme Court order in June that set a July 31 deadline for the move.
Following the strict national lockdown imposed during the first wave of Covid-19, tens of thousands of low-paid workers fled on foot from major cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, and Chennai, with little food or money. Santosh Gangwar, the then-labor minister, told Parliament in September 2020 that the government had no data on how many of these people had left the city.
This is expected to be filled by the migrant workers’ portal. According to the people quoted above, it is a joint venture between the labour and employment ministry and the electronics and information technology ministry’s common service-centres (CSC).
“The portal is fully ready and we will be in a position to begin registration of workers anytime and possibly go live by this week,” a labour ministry official aware of the matter said on condition of anonymity.
Migrants will be able to register on the platform and obtain a unique ID that will allow them to access the portal from a CSC. There are nearly 400,000 CSCs across the country that provide access to a variety of government digital services. “The ID can be used to access government schemes and services regardless of where they live,” said an IT ministry official who did not want to be identified.
Workers in the informal economy are estimated to contribute nearly 50% to the country’s gross domestic product. “One is not clear given the humongous task of registration whether this project will be completed in the near future. The first part is registration, of course,” said KR Syam Sundar, an economist with the Xaviers Labour Relations Institute, Jamshedpur.
