National Social Security Board for Gig Workers Notified

People who earn a living through delivery apps and online platforms were brought inside India's welfare system on 30 October 2026, when the Ministry of Labour and Employment notified the setting up of the National Social Security Board for Unorganised Workers and Gig and Platform Workers. The notification draws its authority from the Code on Social Security, which supplies the statutory base for the body. The Ministry described the step as a landmark one on the road to full social security cover for an informal workforce that runs into millions, and as a historic turn, because workers of the digital economy now sit within the formal welfare structure instead of outside it.

Who sits on the Board

The Union Minister for Labour and Employment presides over the Board. Its membership has been kept deliberately wide. Places on it go to the Central Government and to the State Governments, to well-known aggregator companies, to employers, to civil society organisations, to trade unions of workers, and to associations that speak for gig and platform workers. Seating the aggregators and the platform associations at the same table as the unions is what lets the Board look at app-based work and at the older unorganised trades together rather than separately.

What the Board has to do

• Suggest to the Central Government the schemes that suit each distinct section of unorganised workers, gig workers and platform workers.
• Give the Central Government its advice on matters that come up in running the Code and are placed before it.
• Keep watch over the welfare schemes for these workers that the Central Government itself administers.
• Look at how record keeping is being carried out at the level of the States.
• Go through the spending out of the fund and through the accounts.
• Take up whatever further work the Central Government assigns to it from time to time.

How often it meets

The Board has to sit at least three times in a year. The manner in which it transacts business at those sittings follows rules of procedure laid down by the Central Government. Its brief, in short, is to design, to monitor and to recommend welfare schemes aimed squarely at closing the social security gap faced by gig and platform workers along with workers of the traditional unorganised sectors.