Casual labourers represent one-third (33%) of the Indian workers. Typically, these workers get paid on an hourly or daily basis. The pandemic has brought to the forefront, the multiple challenges this group faces for daily sustenance. Lockdowns resulted into massive job and income losses for workers — construction workers, house helps, cleaners, drivers, among others.

Under this scheme, a MGNREGA job card is issued to those looking for employment in rural areas. Once the card is issued, the individual files for work demand at the Gram Panchayat level and receives paid work within 15 days, depending on the various projects happening at the village level. A minimum wage is guaranteed which varies by state.

For this group of citizens, getting access to government welfare, and social security has never been crucial. Haqdarshak has worked with over 50,000 such workers, and provided them support services to apply for schemes which provided direct benefit like cash support, ration, insurance and pensions. More importantly, most of these workers are migrants, and thus lack basic documentation required for financial assistance or even basic banking services. Our services to them also include linking them to these documents.

In one of our projects, we worked with 20,000 daily wage earners in Rajasthan and Delhi NCR and unlocked benefits worth 14 Crore INR for them. The ROI for the client was over 5X.

We will continue to work with this target audience especially for social security and document linkages as those have been the main pain points.