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WHAT WE DO
Aajeevika Bureau is dedicated to safeguarding the rights and well-being of migrant workers within India’s expansive informal workforce. We deploy a range of interventions and services designed to provide comprehensive support to workers, addressing their needs both at the source and destination end of migration.
Migrant workers constitute a highly dispersed group, spread across multiple urban locations and sectors of work. High levels of mobility, together with the hidden nature of their work and divisions along the lines of caste, language and regional identity, puts constraints on the group’s ability to come together and have a shared voice representing their interests. This lack of mobilization further disempowers this group, rendering them invisible and curtailing their ability to make any demands on the State or industry.
Organising migrant workers into collectives or unions with a strong cadre of leaders is key to strengthening their voice and empowering this group to engage in effective advocacy with State and industry actors. Aajeevika has actively promoted occupation-based workers’ collectives to enable platforms for migrant workers’ unity and representation. At present, there are over 8 worker collectives nurtured by Aajeevika in existence, which together represent thousands of workers from Rajasthan, UP, Bihar, Odisha, and other states. These collectives cover a range of occupations and work sectors such as construction, power looms, small manufacturing, stone carving, and transportation (head-loading).
Organising migrant workers into collectives or unions with a strong cadre of leaders is key to strengthening their voice and empowering this group to engage in effective advocacy with State and industry actors. Aajeevika has actively promoted occupation-based workers’ collectives to enable platforms for migrant workers’ unity and representation. At present, there are over 8 worker collectives nurtured by Aajeevika in existence, which together represent thousands of workers from Rajasthan, UP, Bihar, Odisha, and other states. These collectives cover a range of occupations and work sectors such as construction, power looms, small manufacturing, stone carving, and transportation (head-loading).
Each year, informal workers in India collectively lose billions of rupees because of wage fraud and suffer injuries and accidents that remain uncompensated by contractors, employers, or the state. Recruited through a chain of intermediaries and employed without formal contracts, the lack of evidence and records makes it nearly impossible for workers to assert their claims in a court of law. Our Legal Education and Aid (LEAD) Cell was conceptualised as a powerful, scalable model for addressing these problems and empowering workers to access justice in their recurring experiences of abuse, exploitation and malpractice.
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54.68 crore, recovered by LEAD

LEAD Cell’s ‘walk-in centres’ comprises a team of lawyers, counsellors and staff members trained to piece together the typically thin evidence of employment available in the hands of the worker and resolve cases through mediation and arbitration, as opposed to litigation, which can be time-consuming, ineffective and unaffordable. Over the years, LEAD has recovered over INR 54.68 crores (USD 6.8 million) for workers.

The efficacy of this work rests on a strong cadre of para-legal workers identified from the community institutions (worker collectives; women’s solidarity groups) that we work with.

Aajeevika operates Labour Line (1800-1800-999), a phone-based helpline offering legal aid, mediation, and information. Labour Line is a high impact intervention, providing easy access as well as effective and swift grievance redressal to workers in distress.

Aajeevika operates Labour Line (1800-1800-999), a phone-based helpline offering legal aid, mediation, and information. Labour Line is a high impact intervention, providing easy access as well as effective and swift grievance redressal to workers in distress.

Operationalised in the year 2011, at present, Labour Line receives an average of five thousand calls each month from workers across Rajasthan and Gujarat. While at its core LabourLine is an endeavour to provide legal support to workers, it is also an equally effective platform for facilitating workers’ linkages to entitlements.India Labour Line (ILL) (1800-833-9020) has been set up as a scaled up version of Aajeevika’s helpline based legal aid model. With administrative headquarters in Mumbai, Gurgaon and Bangalore, ILL is currently operational in 13 cities across 9 states. LEAD Cell extends primary technical support to ILL. It is also supported by a network of labour organisations and platforms including the Working Peoples’ Coalition. As of June 2024, ILL has registered approximately 21,000 cases and recovered a sum of 21 crores.

As of June 2024,

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23,888
registrations

Social security linkages and BOCW Board registrations

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21,752
cases

Cases registered by ILL

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8,675
cases

Cases resolved

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21.09
crores

Unpaid wages and compensation recovered

Our Skill Training, Employability and Placement (STEP) Academy is a unique learning institution dedicated to building technical and life skill competencies among rural youth. STEP Academy reaches youth who are at the threshold of starting work or have entered labour markets in low waged, hazardous work. In more recent years, STEP has also made concerted efforts towards increasing its outreach to young women, designing and hosting a variety of trainings that promote non-traditional livelihoods.
STEP has designed several innovative skilling programmes that help bring vocational skills to youth in a relatively short span of time. STEP Academy goes beyond the conventional by placing strong emphasis on building life skills through an array of innovative and interactive tools.
STEP Academy has trained thousands of the rural youth – both men and women. It has played a vital role in improving wages, business incomes and job security for youth from disadvantaged background.
Migrant workers form the pulse of the informal economy, often at the cost of their own well-being and life. Informal sector workers are at substantially high risk of injury, ill health, and death because of the hazardous and strenuous nature of their work, compounded by poor living conditions, inadequate nutrition, and poor access to healthcare and social security. Worksite accidents and deaths continue to go unrecorded across the country. In the aftermath of accidents, accessing due compensation is a protracted and onerous exercise for injured workers or next of kin.
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Another invisible segment is that of workers who die of life threatening diseases caused by prolonged exposure to toxins, chemicals, and other carcinogens at worksites. In settings where casual work is the norm and employers don’t stay constant, establishing employer liability becomes near impossible when workers are diagnosed with occupational diseases. The responsibility for rehabilitation and compensation shifts to the State in such cases, leaving little incentive for the industry to invest in prevention.
Aajeevika is building a systematic institutional response to issues of occupational safety and health through research, evidence-based advocacy, worker education and promotion of workers’ platform to advocate with government and employers. Our interventions include the promotion of worksite safety in partnership with occupational health experts, government, and industry.
Our direct interventions in the space of occupational safety and health (OSH) currently span industrial hubs in three states (Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Rajasthan). Aajeevika also supports several young activists, who are integral to our efforts around taking this critical work to uncovered geographies where we aren’t ourselves present. Our flagship fellowship programme, called Work in Dignity , supports Fellows through the process of seeding and strengthening labour rights action in underserved labour markets. The Fellowship lays a special emphasis on activating OSH and legal aid.
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Aajeevika has been trying to build a systematic institutional response to issues of occupational safety and health through research, evidence-based advocacy, worker education and promotion of worker’s platform to advocate with government and the industry. Our interventions also include the promotion of worksite safety in partnership with a variety of stakeholders, including occupational health experts, government, and the industry.
While our direct interventions in the space of occupational safety and health (OSH) currently span industrial hubs in three states (Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Rajasthan), Aajeevika also supports several young activists, who are integral to our efforts around taking this critical work to uncovered geographies where we aren’t ourselves present. We do this through a program called the Work in Dignity Fellowship, which supports Fellows through the process of seeding and strengthening labour rights action in locations where such work has thus far been limited. The Fellowship lays a special emphasis on activating OSH and legal aid related interventions.
Women constitute a large yet invisible segment of the workforce across urban and rural labour markets. In addition to the routine forms of exploitation observed within informal labour markets, this demographic encounters gender-specific challenges, including workplace harassment, unequal wages, and poor access to basic sanitation and healthcare facilities. Building a response to these, Aajeevika has established dedicated resource centres, called Mahila Shramik Shakti Kendras (MSSK), in key destination cities like Ahmedabad and Surat. MSSKs are critical sites for the mobilization of women workers and facilitation of linkages to legal aid, public institutions and basic entitlements. Over five thousand women workers have been brought into the fold of workers’ collectives across Ahmedabad, Surat, Mumbai and south Rajasthan. This strong collectivization has helped leverage a response from employers and local administration.
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15,000 women, Ujala Samoohs across rural south Rajasthan

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At the rural end of the migration channel, as men migrate to cities, women must sustain their families through increased care and work responsibilities. Their labour remains invisible and unpaid, and indirectly over-compensates for the extractive conditions in which migrants must work. Aajeevika’s Family Empowerment Programme works to empower this segment of women through a seemingly simple, yet powerful strategy of organizing them into hamlet level solidarity groups, called Ujala Samoohs. The Samoohs are platforms through which women cultivate strong bonds of mutual concern, and come together to articulate their needs and claim their entitlements from local administration. Ujala Samoohs are organized into apex structures at the Block level (Ujala Sangathan), to become a force representing women’s voices. With a strength of over 15,000 women across rural south Rajasthan, interventions and collective action led by the Sangathan has allowed for thousands of migration-dependent families to be linked to basic entitlements, including full and regular work under NREGA, regular pension and subsidized ration.
Informal work results in precarious employment, exploitative wages and poor working conditions. For households dependent on lowly paid informal work, social protection and welfare are critical to ensuring that basic needs are met and protection is assured against risks and interruptions in income. Within the Indian context however, despite the significant progress made over the past several decades in extending social protection coverage to workers in the informal economy, large proportions of workers remain unprotected.
Aajeevika’s Worker Facilitation Centres (WFCs) function as a critical bridge between social security provisions offered by the State and households dependent on informal work and migration, offering a range of services, including the direct facilitation of linkage processes. With the support of workers’ collectives across rural and urban locations, we’ve been able to link more than thirty thousand migrant households and workers to critical entitlements and services, including schemes offered by the Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Board, e-shram registrations, insurance, pension and ration. Worker collectives nurtured by Aajeevika have also been instrumental in advocating for better inclusion under provisions like PF and ESI.
Our knowledge and policy team has been at the forefront of driving broader critical discourse around systemic gaps in social protection and policy oversights.
Work Fair and Free Foundation (WFF, erstwhile Centre for Migration and Labour Solutions) is a knowledge institution conceived and incubated by Aajeevika Bureau driven by a commitment to advance worker-centric knowledge and action, so that informal labour migration can become more secure and dignified. WFF aims to bring together grounded and rigorous research, insightful policy work, and innovative teaching and training, all supported and informed by impactful practice in urban industrial centres as well as rural migration clusters.

WFF draws upon Aajeevika’s practice in field locations using participatory tools of inquiry and blends these with wider research evidence to formulate policy positions and arguments.

WFF’s research inquiries have a strong focus on the structural and political economy questions located at the cusp of labour and migration, gender, occupational safety, labour law, industrial supply chains, and urban governance. These inquiries are grounded in ethnographic action research which reflects concerns arising from the communities we work with. Findings from our research and writing not only directly feed into our programmes but also help us shape policy messages for the state, industry, labour organisations, civil society groups and multi-lateral organisations such as the ILO.

WFF’s outputs take various forms – tools to support grassroots mobilisation and workers’ solidarity groups, collectives, and unions; dialogues with state and industry to demand fairer labour practices and policies; as well as popular media and journal articles. WFF’s blog Migrantscape , features multilingual insights and reflections from our practice, as well as guest commentaries on issues related to labour and migration.
Get In Touch
39, Krishna Colony, Bedla Road, Near Khan Complex, Udaipur, Rajasthan – 313001
[email protected]

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