NITI Aayog calls for Mission Digital ShramSetu to make AI accessible for workers

09 Oct 2025 Evaluate

With an aim to make Artificial Intelligence (AI) accessible, affordable, and impactful for every worker, NITI Aayog has called for 'Mission Digital ShramSetu', a proposed national mission to create the roadmap and ecosystem. It highlighted that the mission will harness AI, blockchain, immersive learning, and other frontier technologies to dismantle structural constraints - ranging from financial insecurity and limited market access to lack of skilling and social protection. Further, the mission will empower informal workers with tools and platforms that will amplify their skills, increase productivity, and ensure dignity in work.

Moreover, it suggested that AI can serve as a true equaliser - lifting the millions at the margins into the mainstream of India's growth story and turning the vision of Viksit Bharat 2047 into reality. This can be achieved only through coordination and collaboration across government, industry, academia, and civil society. It noted that most discussions and reports on AI focus on white-collar professionals and predict an almost certain loss of jobs in the segment in the absence of urgent interventions. It emphasized the need to pay attention toward how AI can serve India's 490 million informal workers, the very people who form the backbone of the economy. 

NITI Aayog CEO BVR Subrahmanyam said ‘If we are serious about transforming the lives of India's 490 million informal workers, collaboration is not optional - it is non-negotiable.’  He noted that this goal demands cross-functional actions from focused R&D that reduce the cost of frontier technologies, to building a sustainable ecosystem of innovation tailored to the informal sector, to skilling and reskilling at scale. Niti Aayog also highlighted five core challenges, namely financial insecurity, limited market access, lack of skilling, inadequate social protection and low productivity, continue to hold back India's informal segment from realising its full potential. Further, these challenges are rooted in four deeper systemic barriers: lack of trust, poor access and usability of services, low awareness and skills and outdated tools and processes.

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