From Employment to Citizenship? The Organised–Unorganised Divide in India’s Social Security Architecture after the Code on Social Security, 2020

Abstract

India’s social protection coverage is reported to have risen from about 19 per cent of the population in 2015 to roughly 68 per cent in 2026, a shift the International Labour Organization has described as among the steepest recorded anywhere. Yet close to nine in ten Indian workers remain informally employed. This paper asks how both facts can be true at once, and what the answer reveals about the design of Indian social security law. It argues that the Indian system was constructed around the standard employment relationship, and that the Code on Social Security, 2020 – brought into force on 21 November 2025 and operationalised through the Social Security (Central) Rules, 2026 – consolidates that architecture without dissolving it. The Code universalises the language of entitlement while retaining the employer–employee relationship and numerical establishment thresholds as the mechanism through which enforceable rights arise; for the informal majority it substitutes registration, enumeration and discretionary schemes financed from a Social Security Fund whose contribution rates remain unnotified. The divide is therefore not abolished but re-inscribed, with statutory entitlement on one side and administrative enrolment on the other. The paper locates the origins of this design in colonial and early post-colonial statute-making, traces its constitutional underwriting in the non-justiciability of the Directive Principles and the Concurrent List allocation of labour, and tests the argument against the record of the informal-sector instruments, the e-Shram database and the delivery experience of local self-government institutions. Kerala’s sectoral welfare fund boards are examined as an alternative model that decouples entitlement from the employment contract, and as a case of federal implementation asymmetry under a Concurrent List subject.