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The Ministry of Labour & Employment told the Lok Sabha on 3 August 2026 that over 31.82 crore unorganised workers have been registered on the eShram portal, launched on 26 August 2021 to build the National Database of Unorganised Workers (NDUW).
Fifteen schemes of different Central Ministries and Departments have been integrated with the eShram 'One-Stop-Solution', launched on 21 October 2024 following the Budget Announcement 2024-25, so a registered worker can see and access benefits from one place.
Registration happens only after Aadhaar-based eKYC, with name, gender, date of birth, permanent address and photograph pulled directly from UIDAI to prevent duplicate or fraudulent entries.
In a companion reply, the Ministry said more than 54 lakh beneficiaries had enrolled under Pradhan Mantri Shram Yogi Maandhan as on 29 July 2026, with women making up 53.1% of them.
PM-SYM pays an assured pension of ₹3,000 a month after age 60 on a 50:50 contributory basis; the Government's matching contribution so far totals ₹2,011.01 crore, and because the scheme began in February 2019, pension disbursement will not start before February 2039.
Create a single national database of unorganised workers — including gig, platform and migrant workers — so that welfare delivery can be targeted rather than estimated. Run by the Ministry of Labour and Employment.
Key: Launched 26 August 2021. Registration is on self-declaration but only after Aadhaar-based eKYC, with name, gender, date of birth, permanent address and photograph fetched from UIDAI. Each worker receives a Universal Account Number (UAN). Registration routes: self-registration on the web portal and mobile app, plus assisted registration through Common Service Centres (CSCs), State Sewa Kendras (SSKs) and the UMANG platform.
Announced in the Budget 2024-25 vision and launched on 21 October 2024 to integrate social security and welfare schemes on a single portal, so a registered worker can both access schemes and see which benefits they have already received.
Key: Fifteen Central schemes are integrated or mapped, including PM SVANidhi, PMSBY, PMJJBY, VB-G RAM G, PMAY-Gramin, AB-PMJAY, PMAY-Urban, PMMSY, PM-KISAN, One Nation One Ration Card and PMMVY. Separately, eShram links to the National Career Service for jobs, the Skill India Digital Hub for training, PM-SYM for pension, and the MoHUA convergence portal.
Old-age income protection for unorganised sector workers. Launched in February 2019; voluntary and contributory.
Key: Assured pension of ₹3,000 a month after 60. Entry age 18–40 with monthly income up to ₹15,000; applicants must not be members of EPFO, ESIC or the Central Government-contributed NPS, and must not be income tax assessees. Monthly contribution ₹55–₹200 by entry age, with an equal matching contribution from the Central Government. Enrolment through about 4 lakh CSCs or self-enrolment at maandhan.in. New features added include Voluntary Exit, a Revival Module, Claim Status and Account Statement, and the dormant-account revival window was widened from one year to three.
Use the registration base of one scheme to drive enrolment in the other.
Key: Listed by the Ministry among the steps taken to improve retention and participation, alongside CSC enrolment incentives, SMS campaigns, periodic review meetings with States/UTs and nationwide special registration drives.
Administers the contributory provident fund, pension and insurance schemes for the organised-sector workforce under the Employees' Provident Funds and Miscellaneous Provisions Act, 1952 (in force from 4 March 1952). Membership of EPFO is a disqualification for PM-SYM — the two schemes are designed to partition the workforce, not overlap.
Supplies the Aadhaar eKYC authentication on which every eShram registration depends, and the demographic fields the portal pulls in to prevent duplicate or fraudulent registrations.
The assisted-registration channel — a network of about 4 lakh centres used for both eShram registration and PM-SYM enrolment, with incentives paid to CSCs for PM-SYM enrolments.
Implements Ayushman Bharat — Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana, one of the fifteen schemes mapped to eShram. AB-PMJAY was launched on 23 September 2018 at Ranchi and provides health cover of ₹5 lakh per family per year for secondary and tertiary care hospitalisation.
The Code on Social Security, 2020 was the first Indian statute to define these categories. A gig worker is a person who performs work or participates in a work arrangement and earns from such activities outside the traditional employer-employee relationship. A platform worker is a subset of that idea, defined by the channel: someone who works outside the traditional employer-employee relationship and accesses organisations or individuals through an online platform to provide services for payment. The distinction matters because the entire architecture of Indian labour law — provident fund, gratuity, industrial disputes — was built on the employer-employee relationship, so a worker outside it fell outside everything. The Code also created the machinery to fund cover for them: Section 114 provides for specified categories of aggregators to contribute between 1% and 2% of annual turnover to a social security fund, subject to a ceiling of 5% of the amount paid to those workers. eShram is the registration layer that makes such a system administrable — you cannot pay a benefit to a worker who is in no database.
Simple Analogy: Old labour law asked 'who is your employer?' and stopped if there was no answer. The gig/platform definitions ask instead 'how do you get work?' — and eShram gives everyone who answers a number to be found by.
Consolidates nine earlier social security statutes, defines 'gig worker', 'platform worker' and 'unorganised worker', and provides in Section 114 for aggregator contributions of 1–2% of annual turnover (capped at 5% of payments to workers) towards social security for gig and platform workers.
The earlier law for unorganised-sector social security; it is among the statutes subsumed by the Code on Social Security, 2020.
The statute behind EPFO. PM-SYM excludes EPFO members, so the Act effectively draws the boundary line between the organised-sector pension architecture and this unorganised-sector one.
eShram registers a worker only after successful Aadhaar eKYC authentication and fetches core identity fields from UIDAI, which is the Ministry's stated safeguard against duplicate and fraudulent registrations.
| Aspect | eShram | PM-SYM |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A registration database — the National Database of Unorganised Workers | A voluntary contributory pension scheme |
| Launched | 26 August 2021 | February 2019 |
| Coverage so far | Over 31.82 crore registered workers | Over 54 lakh beneficiaries (29.07.2026) |
| What the worker gets | A Universal Account Number and access to 15 integrated Central schemes | ₹3,000 assured monthly pension after age 60 |
| Cost to the worker | Free; self-declaration after Aadhaar eKYC | ₹55–₹200 a month by entry age, matched equally by the Centre |
| Eligibility limits | Unorganised workers generally, including gig, platform and migrant workers | Age 18–40, income up to ₹15,000/month, not in EPFO/ESIC/NPS (Central Govt contributed), not an income tax assessee |
Registration is nearly universal in scale; contributory pension enrolment is roughly 0.2% of it. That gap is the standing policy problem with contributory social security for workers whose income is irregular — the ₹55–₹200 monthly contribution is the barrier, not awareness, which is why the Ministry's listed remedies focus on retention, revival of dormant accounts and CSC incentives.
PM-SYM pension cannot begin before February 2039, twenty years after launch, because the youngest possible entrant in 2019 was 18 and the earliest entrant at 40 reaches 60 only then. A scheme whose first payout is two decades away must hold contributors through many years with nothing visible in return — hence the Voluntary Exit and Revival modules.
AB-PMJAY, launched 23 September 2018 with ₹5 lakh per family per year of hospitalisation cover and implemented by the National Health Authority, is one of the fifteen schemes mapped to eShram — an example of the One-Stop-Solution's logic: the worker's eShram identity becomes the key to benefits administered by other ministries.
At 53.1%, women are a majority of PM-SYM enrolees — unusual among contributory schemes and worth noting against the general pattern of lower female participation in formal financial products.
GS Paper 2 > Governance > Welfare Schemes for Vulnerable Sections; GS Paper 3 > Employment
General Awareness > Government Schemes
General Awareness > Social Security and Financial Schemes
eShram and the Maandhan pension schemes appear in Parliament replies every session and recur in prelims scheme questions.
National Database of Unorganised Workers — the database eShram creates, covering platform, gig and migrant workers.
Universal Account Number issued to every eShram registrant on self-declaration after Aadhaar eKYC.
Under the Code on Social Security, 2020, a person earning from a work arrangement outside the traditional employer-employee relationship.
A worker outside the traditional employer-employee relationship who accesses organisations or individuals through an online platform to provide services for payment.
The eShram feature launched 21 October 2024 integrating multiple welfare schemes at a single portal.