In March 2020, millions of migrant workers walked sometimes thousands of miles back to their villages from Indian cities, leading to a humanitarian tragedy of unforeseen proportions, and a cascade of responses from the state and civil society. State administrations reacted with insensitivity, dousing workers with disinfectant, unleashing violence, increasing working hours, or forcing workers to stay back. At the same time, massive public consternation about the crisis led the Supreme Court of India to take suo-moto cognizance of the situation and seek explanations from the government.

With close to 90 percent of India’s total workforce employed in the informal economy, the average Indian worker labors in the absence of state regulations or protection. The economic reforms in India in 1991 saw the invigoration of business-friendly labor laws, the accelerated contractualization of the workforce, and a steep increase in the ranks of long-distance short-term migrant workers to India’s urban growth hubs. In 2020, the Indian government swiftly passed four new labor laws, further diluting existing modalities of labor protection, reducing the accountability on employers, and curtailing workers’ rights to collectivize.

The pandemic highlighted the effects of this unchecked transformation: in a poignant display of their utter vulnerability, migrant workers were literally gone. The central government admitted its inability to disburse immediate relief or social security benefits to millions of unorganized sector workers, despite the presence of large welfare funds that had been set up using levies on employers in various sectors. It was also apparent that the government had no reliable picture of the scale of migration or the contours of the informal migrant workforce, despite decades of demands from academics and activists to formally define and measure these phenomena. The underrepresentation of informal work in policymaking has been accentuated by developmental shifts leading to the increased, yet inconsistent, mobility of workers across places and sectors, making measurement and documentation difficult.

An immediate policy response to the migrant labor crisis was the creation of a national digital database of unorganized sector workers called e-Shram, launched in August 2021. Based on the self-registration model, the e-Shram portal aims to register informal workers by assigning them unique numbers, which are in turn linked with their Aadhaar numbers (the national biometric identification system). In theory, registration on e-Shram is supposed to facilitate linkage with various welfare schemes, streamlining the disbursal of benefits. The rapid expansion of digitalization and the implicit centralization of worker data is projected as the basis of all future policy initiatives, aimed at standardizing and integrating welfare schemes for informal workers across all levels of government. Although guidelines on data sharing between various levels of government have been developed, the protocols are vague and undefined, accentuating a much older problem of portability of welfare benefits between states within India. As per the official website, approximately 300 million workers had registered on the platform by June 2025.

However, the imagined digital panacea has ignored both the nature of the informal workforce in India and existing problems in the governance of labor and social welfare schemes. Most migrant workers stay in different parts of the country for varying stretches of time, and may change cell phone numbers, or they may not have consistent access to cell phones. Workers are supposed to have bank accounts linked to Aadhaar and phone numbers, where they receive benefits, but an itinerant work life may mean that many workers are outside this system. The database assumes a level of technical literacy that is non-existent within informal workers. For benefit claims to be valid, workers are required to constantly update their locations, which must be verified by officials in both the home and destination states—posing yet another obstacle. In addition, labor departments at both the central and state levels report an absence of technically trained staff to handle and manage the demands of digitalized governance.

The policy imagination of the worker in digitalized governance systems sharply contrasts with the lived realities of the informal workforce, whose lives are in constant flux. The assumption that all workers will (want to) register for welfare schemes reveals ignorance of the inadequacy or inaccessibility of benefits, which leads workers to choose a day’s work over getting embroiled in the labyrinthine bureaucracy of digital registration. India’s recent focus on digitalization as a core feature of labor governance, both for compliance and welfare, is intended to visibilize an invisible segment of India’s labor force. However, current efforts point to nominal visibility at the level of the database together with a slide back into invisibility in terms of policy efficacy.

Moreover, the figure of the worker may be rendered academically elusive, with studies capturing their reality only in fragments, be it in terms of their motivations to migrate, their responses to structural conditions, or their understandings of agency. Conventional lenses of exploring labor control, resistance, collectivization, or agency appear increasingly inadequate, with crisscrossing locational complications adding layers to workers’ conceptions of welfare, mobility, identity, or entitlements. Given that most migrant workers belong to historically marginalized sections of the Indian population, parsing the figure of the worker must be sensitive to spatial, social, and intergenerational inequalities.

The lived experience of the long-distance migrant worker in India can be understood only at the intersections of enquiries on policy, labor, migration, and digitalization of governance. The interplay of welfare regimes, digitalization, and spiraling mobility of labor, as refracted through workers’ experiences, may produce insights into the exclusionary effects of policy aimed at enhancing inclusion. As structures of capital accumulation rely on a fragmented and fluctuating workforce, augmented by the easy evasion of accountability and regulatory compliance by employers, enhancing dialogue between these subfields in unpacking these alignments appears more urgent than ever.

Acknowledgements

This piece is dedicated to the memory of Rohit Bisht, who imagined a better world for workers. These reflections have emerged from a collaborative study on migrant labor supply chains in the construction industry in India, conducted with Carol Upadhya, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru. The study was supported by grants from the Indian Council for Social Science Research and Azim Premji University.