One Nation, One Workforce: Govt plans integrated system to ensure social-security portability for all workers

New Delhi: The ministry of labour and employment plans to build a unified One Nation Integrated Workforce Architecture that will link databases across different ministries and states to improve policy coherence, ensure portability of benefits for workers and measure employment outcomes.

The idea is to connect data from various sectors like health, finance and rural development, and allow workers to carry their social security benefits with them as they move across states or sectors.

“Effective implementation of Shram Shakti Niti 2025 requires strong horizontal and vertical coordination across ministries, flagship missions and state governments,” a senior government official said. “Convergence will ensure efficient resource use, harmonised data flows and coherent delivery of worker-centred services,” the official added. The government plans to attain 100% worker registration and full social-security portability under the universal social security plan beyond 2030 as part of the third phase of the proposed National Labour and Employment Policy.

The government is of the view that this integrated architecture will help establish universal social security for all workers within the system while aligning objectives and eliminating duplication of efforts between Centre and states. The plan is to integrate AI-driven analytics on the integrated architecture for predictive policy planning, skill forecasting and risk-based inspections.With the development of the integrated architecture, the labour ministry is hopeful of covering all unorganised workers and ensuring all eligible benefits are available to the registered beneficiaries. Besides, the convergence of data between Centre and states will help weed out duplicate beneficiaries and also help governments to rationalise their social security expenditure.

A National Labour and Employment Policy Implementation Council (NLEPI) will be set up to undertake periodic joint reviews to ensure outreach of labour welfare measures till the last mile in cooperation with states.

The ministry plans periodic social audits to review service quality at the grassroots level and an independent evaluation and review at the national level every five years to assess impact, recommend mid-course corrections and update targets in line with emerging labour-market trends.

The e-Shram portal of the labour ministry has over 313 million unorganised workers registered on it and availing benefits of over a dozen central schemes. However, the rate of registration has slowed down considerably with the initial target of registering an estimated 370 million unorganised workers.