The problem
About nine in ten Indian workers are in the informal sector: roughly 419 million of 465 million, by the Periodic Labour Force Survey for 2018–19. More than 31 crore of them have since registered on the government's e-Shram portal. Of those registered, over 94% report earning less than ₹10,000 a month.
Being registered has not changed how they find work. Most informal jobs are contractual and many are done by migrants, so the next job still comes through a contractor or someone the worker knows.
Hiring apps have reached workers who own a smartphone and live in a large city. For the rest there is still no way to show an employer a work history they can trust, or to agree pay before turning up. Jobs that could be found by voice or on a basic phone would reach far more of them.
- Who has this problem
- Construction, factory, delivery, domestic and other informal workers, many of them migrants.
- Languages needed
- Hindi and regional languages
Where the demand comes from
What people do today
- The workaround
- They depend on a contractor, a relative already in the city, or a daily labour market.
- Why that fails
- The contractor controls who gets work and takes a cut. The worker has no record of experience to show the next employer.
How others solved it2
Products and services that work on a similar problem, in India and elsewhere.
- ApnaIndia
A hiring app for blue-collar, grey-collar and entry-level jobs.
- e-ShramIndia
Government database of informal workers, built to extend social security to them.
Read and watch2
Where the facts on this page come from.