The e-Shram portal, launched in August 2021 by the Ministry of Labour and Employment, completed five years of operation in 2026. It has registered over 300 million unorganised sector workers, assigning each a Universal Account Number linked to Aadhaar. The portal serves as India's first centralised national database of unorganised workers, enabling direct benefit transfers and scheme convergence for construction labourers, domestic workers, migrant workers, street vendors, and gig workers across all states.

e-Shram addresses a foundational governance problem: India's unorganised sector employs roughly 90% of the workforce, yet these workers were invisible to the state — no registry, no portability of benefits, no identity in the social protection architecture. The portal solves this by creating a Universal Account Number (UAN) seeded with Aadhaar, mobile number, and bank account, making each worker uniquely identifiable and directly reachable for welfare delivery.

The economic delivery mechanism is critical for exam purposes. Once registered, workers can access PM Suraksha Bima Yojana (accidental insurance of ₹2 lakh), are mapped for PM Shram Yogi Maandhan (pension scheme for unorganised workers), and become eligible for priority delivery under other centrally sponsored schemes. The portal enables scheme convergence — a single registration unlocking multiple entitlements — which is the model the government is scaling through the Jan Samarth and UMANG platforms.

For NABARD aspirants, the rural credit angle is significant: a large share of registrants are agricultural labourers and rural migrants. Formalising their identity could eventually improve credit access by providing verifiable income and employment history — a step toward priority sector lending inclusion. For UPSC aspirants, e-Shram exemplifies the shift from scheme-centric to beneficiary-centric governance, where the database precedes and enables welfare, rather than welfare being delivered scheme by scheme without a beneficiary registry.