The government’s ambitious plan to create a unified labour database — the One Nation, One Workforce — is being hailed as a breakthrough in efficiency and inclusion. In theory, a single digital platform linking every Indian worker to jobs, welfare schemes, and social-security benefits sounds both modern and humane. Yet, beneath the promise of efficiency lies a quieter danger: digital inclusion without digital rights. By integrating multiple labour databases without adequate privacy safeguards, the state risks turning its workforce into a field of surveillance rather than empowerment.
The idea is not new. Over the past few years, India has built several labour platforms — the e-Shram portal for unorganised workers, the National Career Service (NCS) for job-seekers, ASEEM for skill mapping, and Udyam for enterprise registration. The government now seeks to merge them into an interoperable ecosystem, offering seamless worker registration, portable benefits, and real-time labour-market data for policymaking.
As of December 2022, the e-Shram database alone had recorded over 28 crore registrations. Such integration could indeed make welfare delivery more targeted and labour mobility easier. But without a legal and institutional framework to protect worker data, the system may give the state full visibility over its citizens’ livelihoods — and little accountability in return.
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Unified labour database will boost efficiency
Linking e-Shram, NCS, ASEEM and Udyam makes economic sense. The unorganised sector labour force in India is estimated at well over 80 per cent of the workforce; informality itself is identified by recent academic work as a major determinant of weaker wages and mismatches rather than education-occupation gaps alone. By capturing data on workers’ occupations, qualifications and skills (as e-Shram does) and merging it with job-matching (NCS) and enterprise registration (Udyam), the Government builds an architecture for smart labour-policy delivery.
The Economic Survey notes that e-Shram registrations as of December 2022 comprised over 28.5 crore workers (52.8 per cent female; 61.7 per cent aged 18-40) with agriculture accounting for 52.4 per cent of registrations, followed by domestic and construction workers. This spatial and demographic detail allows the state to understand labour-mobility, skilling needs and regional labour-shortages in a dynamic economy. The linking of portals enables portability of social security, which is essential given the high levels of migration and informal employment in India.
Moreover, for micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) the inter-linking is meant to reduce paperwork and friction. The Budget documents had hoped that banks, credit agencies and enterprises would draw on these data-pools to enable faster labour-matching and business scaling. In that sense, the push is coherent with India’s growth agenda and the transition towards a more dynamic labour market.
Mechanisms at work: How the architecture functions
Under this architecture, each worker in the unorganised sector registers on the e-Shram portal, obtains a Universal Account Number (UAN) and joins a national labour database. Their credentials (occupation, skills, migration status, location) are recorded, Aadhaar-seeded, and linked. The NCS portal draws on this database to match job-seekers with vacancies; the ASEEM platform identifies supply-demand mismatches; Udyam registers enterprises and links employer demand to labour supply. Essentially, the system treats labour as data: it collects, integrates and uses it for policy and market matching.
The benefit is the elimination of information silos and redundancies. For example, a migrant labourer moving between states need not re-register for each welfare scheme, or the state need not rebuild labour-mobility data from scratch. The portability of data becomes the key. If properly managed, it yields efficiency gains, reduces transactional costs and improves targeting of welfare schemes — vital given resource constraints and the scale of informality in India.
The surveillance risk: When efficiency becomes visibility
However, the very architecture that increases efficiency also increases state visibility. When labour becomes data and mobility becomes traceability, the system tilts into surveillance territory. There are several specific concerns.
First, the absence of a fully operational data-protection regime means that the individual worker lacks control over data used about them. India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 (DPDP Act) provides a statutory framework for digital personal data—but it is applicable only to digital personal data, the rules are yet to be notified, and non-digital and non-personal data fall outside its coverage. Given that workers’ data (even on migration, informal employment, wages) is deeply personal, the regulatory vacuum is concerning.
Second, the integration of portals means that the state (and possibly other stakeholders) can track workers across occupation, geography, migration and welfare usage. In a system where consent is weak and the worker is often in a weaker bargaining position, the risk is not just data misuse but the creation of predictive algorithms to monitor labour behaviour.
Scholars characterise this as a “prosthetic state” — using national labour databases to extend state reach into the informal economy. Third, while the architecture purports to empower workers, ownership of data remains with the state. There is little clarity on who can access, share or analyse the data, what checks exist, and how anonymisation (if any) is enforced. In the absence of transparency, the system risks becoming high-resolution labour surveillance.
Fourth, this matters because informal workers are more vulnerable. The records of migration, multiple employments, gig-platform work leave them exposed in a digital record-system without parallel rights. Under such conditions, the daily decisions of labour — when, where, and how to work — might become subject to algorithmic oversight, state micromanagement or data-driven conditionality (for welfare eligibility, mobility permissions, etc.).
Balanced assessment: A dual-lens
It is important to acknowledge that the Government’s ambition is laudable. Fragmented labour markets, invisible informality, skill-mismatch and welfare leakage all drag India’s productivity and inclusiveness. The integrated labour database architecture is arguably a step in the right direction. The policy challenge lies not in the ambition but in the governance of data and rights of labour.
From an economic angle, as the Indian economy shifts to services-led growth, gig-platform work and intra-state migration are becoming dominant. A dynamic labour database can help identify skill deficits, tailor skilling programs, and ease labour mobility between states — thereby enhancing growth potential. The policy papers already note that linking labour-data with demand-data may support interventions such as Apprenticeship schemes, mobility allowances and targeted credit-grants.
Yet from a rights-angle, the absence of clear worker-centric safeguards means the efficiency gains may come at the cost of autonomy and privacy. In a democracy, labour should not be reduced to bytes without rights to withdraw, to correct, to opt-out or to say no. The state may argue public interest in workforce data is paramount—but so is individual dignity and freedom from surveillance.
Safeguarding worker agency in the data ecosystem
To reconcile efficiency with rights, the Government must adopt a dual-track approach. First, finalise and operationalise robust rules under the DPDP Act, ensuring coverage of worker-specific data processing, transparency of access, mandatory audit-logs, and worker-consent mechanisms tailored for informal labour. Second, institute a Labour Data Protection Framework within the architecture of labour-registrations: clear limits on access (who can see what and why), mandatory anonymisation for research, default opt-out routes for workers, and periodic data-impact assessments.
For the existing portals (e-Shram, NCS, ASEEM, Udyam) the Ministry of Labour & Employment and related agencies should publish a charter specifying rights of registered workers — access, correction, deletion, portability — and also an oversight mechanism (e.g., independent data-ombudsman or a board). Complement this with transparency through public dashboards on how data is used, by whom, and for which policies.
Finally, embed rights-by-design into the next wave of the architecture: data-minimisation (collect only what is needed), purpose-limitation (no secondary use without consent), audit-trail-creation, and graceful de-registration for workers who cease to engage. Efficiency gains should not override the worker’s agency.
The “One Nation, One Workforce” architecture can improve policy formulation, ease labour mobility, strengthen welfare targeting and boost formalisation. But without digital rights anchored in law and practice it risks ushering in a new era of state surveillance, in which workers are visible but not empowered. The path ahead demands both data ambition and rights protection.