Overview
The central problem of social protection for informal workers in India is portability. Benefits — provident fund, gratuity, health coverage — are tied to stable employment relationships that most informal workers do not have. A construction worker who builds for three contractors in a year, a domestic worker who works in five households simultaneously, a seasonal migrant who returns to agricultural work in the summer: the standard model of contributory social security is designed for none of them.
The Social Protection Pilot tested a portable benefits model in three cities — Delhi, Lucknow, and Patna — enrolling 1,200 workers across construction, domestic work, and street vending. The pilot ran for 18 months, from January 2022 to June 2023.
Design Principles
The pilot was designed around three commitments:
Portability: Benefits follow the worker, not the employer. Workers enrolled once and remained enrolled regardless of employment changes. Contributions could come from multiple employers or from the worker directly.
Layered coverage: Rather than a single benefit type, we tested a layered package — a small life insurance component, an accident and hospitalisation benefit, and a linked savings account with a matched contribution from a partner foundation.
Minimal friction: Enrolment through existing worker organisation membership lists. A single Aadhaar-linked account. Claim processes requiring no more than one visit and no notarised documents.
Implementation Partners
The pilot was implemented in partnership with three worker organisations — one in each city — chosen for their existing member trust and administrative capacity. A technology partner built the backend account and contribution tracking system. A Patna-based NGO provided last-mile claim processing support.
The state labour departments in UP and Bihar were briefed at the outset and agreed to observe the pilot. Delhi’s labour department provided data-sharing support.
City Profiles
Delhi: 450 construction workers enrolled through a mason’s cooperative in North-East Delhi. The construction sector posed specific challenges — many workers were seasonal migrants from Jharkhand and Bihar who were present in Delhi only part of the year. We designed a “dormancy” option allowing workers to pause contributions without losing accrued benefits during the off-season.
Lucknow: 380 domestic workers enrolled through a domestic workers’ union. This was the most complex group to serve — workers were dispersed across the city, worked in multiple households, and had highly variable incomes. We piloted a weekly contribution option (₹20–50 per week) alongside the standard monthly contribution, which significantly improved retention.
Patna: 370 street vendors enrolled through a vendors’ association with close links to a municipal ward committee. Patna presented the most challenging documentation environment — many vendors had no Aadhaar or had Aadhaar linked to a village address in a different district.
Results
Enrolment and retention: 1,187 workers enrolled (99% of target). Eighteen-month retention was 71%, with attrition concentrated among seasonal migrants who had returned to home states.
Claims processed: 89 hospitalisation claims processed over 18 months; average time from claim filing to payment was 11 days. 23 accident claims processed. 4 life insurance claims processed, with payments reaching families within 30 days in all cases.
Savings behaviour: Workers in the matched savings component saved an average ₹4,200 over 18 months, against a matched amount of ₹2,100 from the partner foundation. 68% reported using accumulated savings for a specific planned expense (school fees, home repair, medical) rather than emergency consumption.
Worker satisfaction: End-of-pilot surveys showed 84% of enrolled workers reporting the pilot as “useful” or “very useful.” The most valued component, by a significant margin, was the hospitalisation benefit — not the savings match, which had been our design hypothesis.
Learnings for Policy
The pilot generated several findings with direct policy relevance:
The universally-dreaded documentation barrier was real but manageable. With worker organisation support and a help-desk model, even workers with incomplete documentation could enrol within two weeks. The barrier is surmountable with deliberate design — it should not be used to argue against coverage extension.
The informal sector is not monolithic. Construction workers needed seasonal portability; domestic workers needed micro-contribution options; vendors needed address-independent identification. A single national design will not serve all groups equally.
Employer contributions, even nominal ones, improved worker sense of entitlement and reduced stigma associated with claiming benefits. In the Patna pilot, we experimented with a ₹5/day employer contribution from vendor customers — collected voluntarily via a QR-code campaign — that generated both revenue and narrative shift.
Next Steps
A policy brief from the pilot has been submitted to the Ministry of Labour and Employment and to the state governments of UP and Bihar. We are in conversation with a state-level implementation partner to scale the domestic workers’ component to three additional districts in UP.
Pilot designed and overseen by Anshu Jha and a four-person implementation team. Funded by a programme grant from a bilateral development foundation (name withheld per grant terms). Technology partnership with a Bangalore-based civic tech organisation.