The safety net that most workers cannot see

On paper, India's expanding welfare architecture for informal workers — spanning health insurance, accident cover and pension contributions — should already be reaching tens of millions of eligible households. In practice, enrolment figures continue to trail eligibility estimates by a wide margin, and the reasons are less about awareness than about design.

Most scheme applications still assume a worker has a fixed residential address that matches their identity documents, and a continuous relationship with a single employer who can verify their occupation. Migrant construction workers, gig platform drivers and seasonal agricultural labourers routinely fail one or both conditions, not because they are ineligible but because the paperwork was not built with their working lives in mind.

"Every scheme redesign adds a new digital layer, and every digital layer adds a new document requirement," said a labour economist who studies informal sector welfare delivery. "We keep solving for verification and forgetting that verification itself is the barrier for this population."

Portability — the ability to carry accumulated benefits or continued coverage when a worker moves between states for seasonal work — remains only partially functional. A small number of states have signed reciprocal recognition agreements for specific schemes, but most informal workers who cross state lines for work still effectively restart their enrolment process, often losing continuity of coverage in the process.

State labour departments argue that awareness, not documentation, is the larger constraint, pointing to enrolment camps and outreach drives that have shown measurable upticks in sign-ups where they've been run intensively. Independent researchers studying the same data are less convinced, noting that even well-attended awareness camps often see high drop-off rates once workers reach the documentation stage.

The dispute over root cause matters for policy design: if the gap is administrative, the fix is simplifying documentation and building portability; if it is awareness, the fix is outreach spending. Most researchers studying the issue believe the true answer is some combination of both, unevenly distributed across states and worker categories.