Five years ago, Rahul Kumar was an inventory checker at a cosmetics warehouse in New Delhi, ticking items like lipstick and eyeliner off lists on paper.  

Today, working as a driver, he’s earning one and a half times more. And by May next year, after completing a basic computer course, he should be able to create spreadsheets himself, again boosting his income. 

What opened Kumar’s eyes to these job opportunities was advice from his friends and a 12-digit universal account number on his e-Shram card. 

e-Shram is India’s vast database of informal workers, which is integrated with the National Career Service (NCS) portal. Both platforms are run by the Ministry of Labor and Employment, and both are underpinned by Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure.  

The ministry is now steering these informal workers toward jobs with regulated working conditions and access to social security, using generative AI tools on NCS powered by Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service. 

“My friends told me to get a driving license as I could earn more as a driver,” Kumar said. “After that, I registered for an e-Shram card and put down my occupation as driver. Within two to three days, I got a call from a company operating a fleet of cars.”  

But this 25-year-old high school graduate from Ghaziabad, a city about 20 miles, or 32 kilometers, east of New Delhi, is not done yet. 

Once he gets his computing certificate, he will add data entry skills to his job searches on NCS. 

“My friend manages stock and data entry at a pharmacy during the day and works as a driver by night,” Kumar said. “I can double my salary doing the same.” 

Kumar’s career path reflects how e-Shram itself – “Shram” means work or labor in Hindi – has evolved from a worker registry to a conduit for jobs. It also helps workers shift to the formal sector, with AI capabilities paving the way. 

On NCS, workers can see where they can improve their chances of employment by using the skills gap analysis tool or plot their career path using the roadmap manager. They can get help crafting their first resume using a resume generator powered by Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service. A mock interview function is in the works to prepare applicants for that crucial first impression. 

“AI is helping our workers to be part of the formal sector,” said Anjali Rawat, deputy director general of employment at the Ministry of Labour and Employment. 

A database for social security 

e-Shram was launched in August 2021 to register the country’s estimated 400 million informal workers in order to channel social aid to them. Many of them – street-sweepers, house help, daily waged laborers – lost their jobs in the cities during the Covid pandemic and had to return to their villages. 

“Because we did not have any repository of them,” said Rawat, “we did not know how many of them could avail the social security benefits. We were not able to find out how many could actually shift from the informal sector to the formal sector. So, the first step was to create this repository.” 

This would prove to be a mammoth task. 

In India, an informal worker is typically someone employed without a formal contract, regulated working conditions or access to social security benefits like a pension scheme or health insurance. They make up about 82% of the country’s workforce, according to the India Employment Report 2024 by the Institute for Human Development and the International Labour Organization (ILO). 

Manoj Kumar Saxena, senior director (IT) at National Informatics Centre, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), was tasked with getting the e-Shram platform up and running within a month. The challenges were manifold. 

“The government wanted to … take care of these people who suddenly did not have any jobs,” he said. “It thought, we should use technology to give these people a digital identity and benefits.” 

His team had to figure out the best way to get and verify basic information like name, date of birth, gender and address using Aadhaar national identity numbers and mobile numbers. They also had to ensure that the e-Shram system could handle registering hundreds of millions of workers, all while preserving the security of those personal details. 

“We wanted to have scalability, reliability and security, and that is why we were looking for MeitY-accredited hyperscale cloud facilities. Hence, we opted for Microsoft Azure,” Saxena said, explaining the choice of cloud platform. 

At its peak, he said, e-Shram was processing 172,000 transactions per second and handling up to 8 million registrations a day.  

Tools like Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure VM Scale Sets and Azure Cosmos DB, among others, enabled the platform to handle such high volumes with low latency.  

Microsoft Azure’s in-built encryption capabilities, coupled with Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Azure Firewall and Azure Front Door, help guard the platform and secure its data. 

Meanwhile, reaching out to 400 million informal workers, many of whom are itinerant and poorly educated, took grunt work and more technology. 

Key to this outreach were the more than 450,000 common services centers, or CSCs, dotted across the country that were set up to deliver last-mile digital services. At these centers, workers get help keying in particulars like their name, Aadhaar number and details of their education and skills to complete their registrations. 

Registering on e-Shram, via phone or computer, has been made easier with the integration of Bhashini, the government’s AI-powered language platform, which is also hosted on Microsoft Azure and provides real-time translation in 22 local languages. 

Once registered, workers can see what social security benefits they are eligible for. To date, e-Shram boasts more than 310 million workers in its database, and links to 18 welfare programs dispensing aid such as accident insurance, public housing, medical subsidies and farming grants. This effort contributed to India’s widening social protection coverage, which grew from 24% in 2019 to 64% in 2025, according to the ILO. 

Shifting to the formal sector 

Having guided informal workers to register on e-Shram, the labor ministry is now targeting better jobs for them. 

In 2022, India’s national employment platform NCS was integrated with the e-Shram platform, giving informal workers access to jobs and employers across the country. It also offers them career counselling and training courses, which could lead to securing formal sector work that comes with health insurance or retirement savings via the government’s Employees Provident Fund Organization. 

So far, about 17.8 million of the workers registered on e-Shram have signed on to NCS. NCS itself has about 150 million people registered on the portal. “Shifting them towards the formal sector was the next plan of action,” said Rawat. 

She listed other features the ministry plans to roll out on these platforms, including AI chatbots to guide workers registering on e-Shram or creating their resumes on NCS, and a location manager on the mobile app so that workers can search for jobs within their vicinity. These measures make jobs more accessible for the disadvantaged. 

“The big portals generally target the Tier-1 cities… We are trying to target the Tier 2 and tier 3 cities,” Rawat said. 

For Kumar, these features only accelerate his plans. 

“I have to do a lot of things in life,” he said. “I have to advance my career and increase my salary. I also want to study.” 

Future plans 

With e-Shram and NCS becoming “one-stop solutions” for all things related to career and jobs, there are bigger plans in store. 

Data from these platforms can inform labor policy, helping the country match skill sets and training to future jobs, said Rawat. She cites the shortage of plumbers in Germany as an example. 

“Let’s say we need to move our plumbers from India to Germany,” she said. “We should understand what kind of skills they require, and we can provide that skill. Once these unorganized workers get that skill, they are entitled to go abroad for that particular job.” 

Rawat also hopes these platforms will eventually eliminate unscrupulous job brokers, so that India’s workers can be recruited and employed safely at home and abroad. For workers overseas, the Ministry of External Affairs uses its own digital tools, such as the eMigrate portal. 

“e-Shram is integrated with the eMigrate portal, and we have registered agencies trying to get the right people abroad,” she said. 

There are even plans to offer e-Shram and NCS as digital public infrastructure and digital public goods to other countries.  

“We showcased both portals in Geneva, and it was appreciated by various countries,” said Rawat, referring to the International Labour Conference in June 2025. 

“It is tremendous work the country is doing.” 

Top image: e-Shram was launched to register the country’s estimated 400 million unorganized workers. Photo by Selvaprakash Lakshmanan for Microsoft