India has constituted a National Social Security Board for unorganised workers and for gig and platform workers, the labour ministry said in a statement on Friday, creating a single central body to design and monitor welfare schemes for workers outside the employer-employee relationship.
The board will be chaired by the Union labour minister and will draw members from the central and state governments, large aggregator companies, employers, civil society organisations, trade unions and associations of gig and platform workers. It must meet at least three times a year and will review spending from the fund and account set up for these workers.
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What The Board Is Meant To Do
Its role is advisory and supervisory rather than regulatory. The board will recommend to the Centre the framing of schemes for different sections of unorganised, gig and platform workers, advise on matters arising from the administration of the Code on Social Security, monitor the central schemes already running, and review record keeping at the state level.
Read alongside the Code, that mandate is wider than the statement suggests. The law allows the board to act as the board for gig and platform workers as well, and prescribes a separate membership for that role: five representatives of aggregators, five representatives of gig and platform workers, the director general of the Employees State Insurance Corporation and five state government representatives.
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The Money Is A Notification Away
Schemes for these workers are meant to be funded jointly by the Centre, the states and the aggregators. The Code fixes the shape of the aggregator share without fixing its size: the contribution may be set at a rate notified by the government between 1 and 2 per cent of annual turnover, and it cannot exceed 5 per cent of the amount an aggregator pays or owes its gig and platform workers.
Friday’s statement named no levy rate, no fund corpus and no date for the first meeting, which is where the practical questions begin. Until those notifications are issued, a board that can recommend schemes has little money behind them, and the architecture stays a promise on paper for workers who are counted but not covered.
A Workforce Growing Faster Than The Rules
The size of the gap is not in dispute. NITI Aayog put India’s gig workforce at 68 lakh in 2019-20 and 77 lakh in 2020-21, and projected that it would reach about 2.35 crore by 2029-30, or roughly 6.7 per cent of the country’s non-farm workforce. The ministry defines a gig worker as someone outside the traditional employer-employee relationship, and a platform worker as someone who works through or with an online platform.
Those definitions decide who can be registered, and registration is the door to every benefit. The Code provides for registering unorganised, gig and platform workers, but a worker who cannot show which platform he or she works for, and for how long, is hard to place on a list a scheme can pay against.
States Wrote Their Own Rules First
Rajasthan passed the first state law for platform based gig workers in 2023, and Karnataka followed with its own Act in 2025, funded by a welfare fee of 50 paise to one rupee per ride. That law is now contested: the Internet and Mobile Association of India and aggregators including Zomato, Swiggy, Blinkit and Zepto have challenged it in the Karnataka High Court, arguing that the central Code occupies the same field.
A national board does not settle that argument by itself, because the board designs schemes while the courts decide who may compel payment for them. For aggregators the immediate question is cost per order. For workers it is whether the board delivers a registered, portable benefit, or one more committee whose minutes arrive before its money does.
What To Watch
Three markers matter: notification of the aggregator levy and the fund rules, the first meeting and the schemes it clears, and whether registration is linked to an existing platform such as e-Shram so a delivery rider’s record moves when the rider does. The Ministry of Labour and Employment publishes the Code and each rule as it is notified.
The editorial read: the board is a genuine first, arriving six years after the Code was passed and eleven months after it came into force, which is why worker groups remain sceptical. A statutory seat for worker representatives makes it a better forum than a ministry circular, but credibility will be judged on the first scheme it funds and the first worker who can prove enrolment, not on the composition of its membership.
