The lockdown and its impact on the migrant worker community underscored the need for us as an industry to better understand the fault lines that allowed a crisis of this scale to occur. It was a call to action for all stakeholders across the value chain to identify and bridge these systemic barriers to ensure that such a crisis does not happen again. As the government plays its part in safeguarding workers’ rights and providing social protection, business leaders can equally shoulder the responsibility for the future and well-being of our workforce. Industry associations can help champion the cause of workers’ welfare to create a level playing field for responsible businesses, while non-profit organizations can provide critical impetus to this movement through their work on the ground. Together, industry and philanthropy can offer additional resources to address the most distressed communities that not only provide labour to the sector but also require support for skilling, development, growth and well-being. Human-centric outcomes that increase productivity result in a win for all stakeholders.
We hope our experience will provide some insights into what business can do for this critical workforce. Our journey was predicated on a report we commissioned with Dasra, a leading Indian strategic philanthropy-focused NGO, to highlight the realities of informally engaged workers in the construction sector. The report, titled Inclusive by Design: Cementing the future for informal workers in India's construction sector, offers actionable insights on the systemic barriers that heighten the vulnerability of workers employed in this sector.
We took away five key points of advice from this exercise, which highlight the significance of convergence between multiple stakeholders:
The biggest hurdle in addressing the needs of informal workers in government and business policies has been the lack of a comprehensive database that captures their numbers by industry, migration patterns and demographic profiles. Even for available data, there are gaps in timely updating and disaggregation. Only 50 per cent of workers registered under BOCW are eligible for benefits, as the rest do not have updated profiles.
Less than 35 million workers are registered with state welfare boards under the BOCW. Many workers are either unaware of or lack easy access to entitlements or redressal mechanisms, especially with respect to registration under BOCW, banking and Aadhaar. At the onset of the pandemic, 64 per cent of the workforce was unable to avail Direct Benefit Transfers, finding themselves in dire conditions without essentials such as food.
Employment is the reason approximately 10 million workers in India undertake rural–urban migration. Of these, less than 14 per cent have formal skills or education. The low barriers to entry in the construction sector act as a pull factor for unskilled workers, many of whom leave their homes without being aware of the nature of work, wages or living arrangements at their destination. Their journeys are fraught with challenges due to lack of seamless support or opportunities for upskilling.
Women are most affected by informal employment and are more likely to be engaged in low-paying, unskilled work, perpetuating inequity. Responsibilities of care and domestic work further add to their burden. In India, women spend 84 per cent of their working hours on unpaid activities, while men spend 80 per cent of their working hours on paid work. Not only are women likely to be paid 30 to 40 per cent less than their male counterparts, but they were also 1.8 times more vulnerable to job loss during the pandemic.
The choice of work undertaken by the vast demographic of informal workers is often driven by financial distress. Entire families and communities rarely have opportunities that allow them to break away from the intergenerational cycle of poverty. There is a paucity of viable livelihood options at source, fragmented services for building individual capacities at destination, and limited access to market-led training across locations. This pushes children and youth to follow the same occupation as their families and elders.
The report also highlighted key actionable areas for industry-level focus:
In our experience, multi-stakeholder initiatives that bring together industry organizations and associations, non-profits, experts and civil society can help drive more socially sustainable practices across business value chains. The Social Compact is one such initiative that provides a framework for companies to identify potential gaps and blind spots in worker practices. Social Compact standards, spanning six core themes and thirty impact areas, help identify priority areas for worker welfare. To facilitate adoption by a wider set of industry peers, these standards are mapped to both Indian legal requirements and global ESG frameworks.
Participation in such industry-led initiatives can help highlight both areas of strength and opportunities for intervention. In our experience, such assessments have provided insights for setting up targeted programmes—for example, we benefitted from bifurcating workers into those residing in our labour camps and daily workers, recognizing that each cohort had specific requirements that needed to be addressed.
These standards also encourage data capture, including labour participation, attendance records and BOCW registrations by gender, allowing on-ground teams to question biases, improve gender-based participation and ensure equity for women workers.
The task before us is ambitious. It calls for systemic government support, on-ground insights, a coalition of industry peers, a network of non-profits and the patience of philanthropic and CSR capital to join forces. Most importantly, it calls upon us—the employers of this 57-million-strong workforce—to champion this aspiration. As business leaders, we must take greater responsibility for worker practices in our ecosystem.
It also calls upon industry bodies to acknowledge the critical importance of this workforce and to uphold higher standards of worker well-being in a way that enables socially responsible businesses to remain both viable and successful.
As we emerge from the pandemic, India's real estate and construction industries face a choice: to rebuild as before, or to reset the foundation to one that befits an industry of the future that places worker well-being at the core of resilient and sustainable business. In these challenging times, the onus lies with us to chart a future where workers join out of aspiration rather than distress.
‘Excerpted from The Business of Business Is (Not) Just Business edited by Sutapa Banerjee, published by HarperCollins India, 2026.’
Women are most affected by informal employment and are more likely to be engaged in low-paying, unskilled work, perpetuating inequity. Responsibilities of care and domestic work further add to their burden. In India, women spend 84 per cent of their working hours on unpaid activities, while men spend 80 per cent of their working hours on paid work. Not only are women likely to be paid 30 to 40 per cent less than their male counterparts, but they were also 1.8 times more vulnerable to job loss during the pandemic.
