Welfare To Work: The Microsoft Tech Behind India’s Labour Platform

Microsoft technology is underpinning one of India’s largest labour-market platforms, helping the government register more than 310 million informal workers and steer them towards jobs, skills training and social security.

The e-Shram database and the National Career Service platform both run on Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure. The government is using Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service to power tools that help workers identify skills gaps, plan careers and prepare résumés as part of a wider effort to formalise informal employment.

India launched e-Shram in August 2021 to create a national record of informal workers after millions lost jobs during the Covid pandemic. What began as a welfare registry has since expanded into a job-matching and career platform, with Microsoft’s cloud and artificial intelligence services supporting systems used at national scale.

e-Shram assigns registered workers a 12-digit universal account number linked to personal and skills data. Workers can check eligibility for welfare schemes covering accident insurance, housing, medical aid and farming support. The platform currently connects users to 18 government programmes.

The database was built to operate at very high volume. At peak periods, e-Shram processed up to 172,000 transactions per second and handled as many as 8 million registrations a day. The system uses Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets and Azure Cosmos DB to manage demand with low delays.

Security and data protection are handled through built-in Azure encryption, along with Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Azure Firewall and Azure Front Door, according to officials involved in the project.

In 2022, e-Shram was integrated with the National Career Service portal, extending its use beyond welfare delivery to employment. The NCS platform connects job seekers to employers across India and offers access to training courses and career counselling. About 17.8 million e-Shram-registered workers have since joined NCS, which has about 150 million registered users in total.

The labour ministry is now using artificial intelligence tools on NCS, powered by Azure OpenAI Service, to support workers entering the formal job market. These include skills gap analysis, career road-mapping and AI-assisted résumé creation. A mock interview feature is under development.

To reach workers with limited digital access, the government relies on more than 450,000 common services centres across India, where staff assist with registration. The system also integrates Bhashini, an AI-based language platform hosted on Azure that supports real-time translation in 22 Indian languages.

Officials say the data generated by e-Shram and NCS can guide labour policy by identifying skills needs and planning training programmes. The platforms are also linked to overseas recruitment systems through coordination with the eMigrate portal.

The government has begun presenting e-Shram and NCS as digital public infrastructure that could be adopted by other countries. Officials showcased both platforms at the International Labour Conference in Geneva in June 2025, where they drew interest from several delegations.

Labour ministry officials say the long-term goal is to make e-Shram and NCS a single access point for welfare, jobs and skills, while reducing dependence on informal job brokers and improving worker mobility at home and abroad.