Hon’ble Minister of Labour & Employment
Respected Sir ,
I write with respect and a strong belief in India’s digital governance vision —
particularly for labour formalisation and inclusive workforce participation.
It has been reported that the Government plans a study to assess the impact
of formalisation and digital transformation on workers, especially those
moving from the informal to the formal economy:
I wholeheartedly appreciate the intent to build evidence for policy. However, I
respectfully submit that much of the very evidence this study seeks could already
be generated continuously, automatically, and in real time if India were to
implement a Mobile-Based Attendance and Workforce Tracking System
(“MAD”).
In my recent blog titled “From Auto-Populated ITR to Fully Automated India —
Time to Mandate MAD (Mobile Attendance Device)”, I articulated how a digital
attendance layer — implemented nationwide — would become the backbone of
formalisation data:
➡️ https://myblogepage.blogspot.com/2026/02/from-auto-populated-itr-to-fully.html
To summarize a key passage from that blog:
“…India’s digital compliance evolution — from Aadhaar to auto-populated
ITR — now logically extends to a universal Mobile Attendance Device
(MAD) system. Under such a system, employee attendance would be
recorded via mobile devices, geo-tagged and linked to payroll, TDS,
PF/ESIC, income reporting, and social security registrations — thereby
automatically generating verified data on formal and informal workforce
participation.”
A national MAD system, integrated with existing Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI)
— including Aadhaar, eShram, DBT, EPFO, ESIC, GST and Income-Tax IT
stacks — would produce the following continuous by-products:
Verified Workforce Participation Indicators:
Attendance-backed participation records — enabling daily employmentmetrics without recall bias or sampling errors.
Automatic Compliance and Tax Reporting:
Time-stamped mobile attendance feeding directly into payroll, TDS, PF/ESIC,and tax reporting — drastically reducing manual compliance burdens.
Formalisation Footprints for Workers:
Digital work histories that strengthen access to credit, insurance, pensions,and other formal system benefits.
Leakage Reduction and Better DBT Flows:
Attendance-authenticated direct benefit transfers — reducing ghostbeneficiaries and proxy reporting.
Data-Driven Governance over Inspector-Centric Compliance:
With verifiable data streams, compliance shifts from periodic inspections tocontinuous analytics.
Evidence for Policy, Automatically:
Sector-wise, age-wise, gender-wise analytics that preempt the need forstandalone retrospective studies.
Learning Outcome Measurements for Skilling/Training:
Attendance patterns and completion tracking for apprenticeships and skilldevelopment programs.
In essence, instead of paying for a study to discover how formalisation impacts
workers, the Government can build the evidence engine itself through
nationwide MAD implementation.
To illustrate—this would be analogous to how GST transformed indirect tax
compliance data: once GST filings were automated, India no longer needed
quarterly business surveys to measure compliance behaviours. Similarly, a
universal mobile attendance layer becomes the labour market equivalent
of GST filings — turning attendance into data.
I therefore propose that the Ministry consider:
Constituting an Inter-Ministerial Task Force (Labour, Finance, MeitY,
EPFO, NITI Aayog) to define the implementation architecture for MAD;
Piloting MAD across central government establishments, select PSUs, and
representative private sector workplaces;
Integrating MAD outputs with EPFO, ESIC, DBT, eShram, GST, and
Income-Tax systems;
Publishing a National MAD Roadmap with clear milestones for cross-
sector adoption.
If adopted, this approach will transform how India measures and governs
formalisation — making evidence available continuously rather than
retrospectively.
I would be honoured to share a concise technical blueprint or executive summary
for official consideration and review.
With respectful regards,
Hemen Parekh
www.HemenParekh.ai / www.IndiaAGI.ai / www.YourContentCreator.in
24 Feb 2026
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