Think about your morning.

Someone swept your floor before you had your first cup of chai. Someone washed last night’s dishes while you were still asleep. Someone dressed your child, chopped your vegetables, and quietly disappeared before you even registered they had been there.

Now ask yourself: do you know if she has health insurance? Does she have a pension? If her mother fell sick tomorrow — the way mothers do — would she have any safety net at all beyond asking you for a loan and hoping you say yes?

Most of us don’t know. Most of us, if we’re honest, haven’t thought to ask.

For 17-year-old Ayaan Wadhwa, that question became impossible to ignore.

The moment that changed everything

It began with a small but uncomfortable moment at his own front door.

The woman who worked in the Wadhwa household needed money. Her mother was ill. She had no savings, no insurance, and no fallback of any kind, so she did the only thing she could: she asked Ayaan’s mother for a loan and hoped for the best.

It was the kind of request that plays out quietly in homes across Mumbai every day. Most families either say yes or no and move on. Ayaan couldn’t.

“I just kept thinking — if we didn’t give it to her, what would she have done?” he says. “People around me have medical insurance, and that’s when I realised that most workers don’t have access to something that basic.”

He went back to his room and started researching. What he found surprised him.

The government had, in fact, created something for exactly this situation. The e-Shram card — a central welfare scheme for unorganised sector workers — could provide domestic workers with a registered digital identity, accident insurance, access to housing grants, and even a pension.

Ayaan built a booklet on government welfare schemes for domestic workers from scratch, translating it into Hindi and Marathi so it would reach more people.

And yet, when Ayaan returned and asked the woman who had worked in his home for years whether she had heard of any of these schemes, she had never heard of a single one.

“That was the moment,” he says. “Not anger exactly. More like — how is this possible? And then: how do I fix it?”

A booklet, a building, and 80 strangers

What followed was not a sudden burst of activism. Ayaan’s mother, Pinky Panjwani, watched the process unfold and was careful to describe it accurately.

“It wasn’t a sudden revelation,” she says. “It was gradual curiosity. He started asking questions, then researching. Then one day, he said he wanted to conduct a workshop. He was 15, so I told him we’d do it.”

During the summer of 2025, Ayaan began building a booklet from scratch. He researched central and state government schemes available to domestic workers, simplified the information into accessible language, and translated it into Hindi and Marathi. While he could understand Hindi well, speaking it fluently was another challenge. So he practised until he became comfortable enough to conduct workshops himself.

Pinky helped with logistics — approaching sceptical housing society committees, arranging printing, and booking halls. But Ayaan made the pitch to building managements himself. Some were unconvinced. He persisted anyway.

The first workshop was held in their own apartment complex. He had no idea how many people would show up.

80 to 90 workers came.

Armed with his laptop, Ayaan sat with them one by one and walked each person through the government registration portal in real time. Name. Aadhaar details. Phone number. Bank account. Click.

At his first workshop, held in his own apartment complex, 80 to 90 domestic workers showed up — he registered nearly half of them that same evening.

For women who had spent their entire lives working outside the formal economy — women who had Aadhaar cards but had never navigated a government website — this was no small thing.

By the end of the evening, he had registered nearly half the room. He collected phone numbers for everyone else and returned later to complete the process.

What it actually takes

It is easy to speak abstractly about “digital literacy gaps”. It is much harder to sit in a crowded community hall, troubleshooting a government portal that keeps crashing, or patiently explaining to a woman from Uttar Pradesh why her home-state PIN code is not being accepted by a Maharashtra-based system.

“Sometimes workers can’t remember which phone number is linked to their Aadhaar,” Ayaan says with the calm of someone who has solved this problem hundreds of times. “Sometimes it’s their husband’s number, and we have to call him for the OTP. Sometimes the website goes down completely. Sometimes details from another state don’t match what the system expects.”

He says this matter-of-factly, not as a complaint but as a reflection of what last-mile implementation actually looks like.

The distance between a welfare scheme existing on paper and actually reaching the person it was designed for is rarely just technical. More often, it is about trust, time, patience, and having someone willing to sit beside you and say, “Here, let me show you.”

Manisha Dhekde (32) is one of the 750 workers who have benefited from that effort. Hailing from an underserved community in West Mumbai, Manisha has been working as domestic help for nearly 10 years.

She heard about one of Ayaan’s camps through word of mouth — the way most people still hear about such opportunities, because flyers in apartment lobbies only travel so far.

She came, sat across from a teenager with a laptop, and left with an e-Shram card and enrolment in a post office savings scheme. Since then, she says, government benefits have reached her home multiple times.

The camps have directly benefited women who work six-day weeks with no paid leave, no sick days, and no ability to take time off without losing wages. 

But for the camps, they rearranged their mornings, informed employers they would be late, and showed up because someone had finally told them that these schemes existed for them too.

More than 90% of India’s workforce is in the unorganised sector, yet many domestic workers remain unregistered for schemes they’re already entitled to — a gap Ayaan’s workshops aim to close.

“Earlier, I had no idea how to get details in my Aadhaar card rectified, how I could link other documents to my aadhar number and what an e-shram card even was,” she recalls. “But the camp taught me everything patiently. I was able to successfully apply and receive the card through the camp,” Manisha says.

What the number really means

Since early 2026, Ayaan has helped register more than 750 workers across five workshops in Mumbai.

Each registration represents a woman — and it is almost always a woman — who previously had no formal presence within the welfare system despite years, sometimes decades, of labour.

Each card becomes a digital footprint. A first step into social security. A record that says: this person exists, this person works, and this person is entitled to support.

According to the 2024 India Employment Report 2024, more than 90% of India’s workforce is employed in the unorganised sector. While the e-Shram portal has already registered hundreds of millions of workers, many domestic workers in cities like Mumbai continue to remain outside the system — not because the schemes do not exist, but because nobody has ever shown them how to access them.

The initiative has now expanded beyond apartment complexes. Through a connection made by his school counsellor, Ayaan partnered with Saanvi Social Welfare, an NGO that has spent 13 years working with tribal communities across Maharashtra.

Together, they conducted a workshop at a government Ashramshala (residential school) that drew more than 100 students and their mothers. For families who could not attend, students themselves were taught how to guide their parents through the registration process at home. Booklets went back in school bags.

“We empowered the girls, too,” says Isha Rawat. “It became bigger than we planned.”

Rawat has spent years working at the grassroots and says she is cautious about young people who approach marginalised communities wanting to “do something”.

“We’ve been working at the ground level for many years,” she says. “We don’t entertain just anyone.”

Before agreeing to collaborate, she spent nearly two hours on a phone call with Ayaan — much of it, she admits, was a test.

In partnership with Saanvi Social Welfare, Ayaan ran a workshop at a government Ashramshala that drew more than 100 tribal students and their mothers.

“He just kept asking: how do we reach more people? How do we make sure no one is left out?” she says. “That passion is very rare to see in someone his age. It’s rare in anyone.”

At the tribal school, the workshops evolved into something larger than registration drives. They became intergenerational knowledge-sharing spaces, where daughters were taught to help mothers navigate digital systems many adults still found intimidating.

Rawat says even her own cook did not have an e-Shram card before she began working with Ayaan.

“I asked her, ‘Do you have this card?’ She said no,” Rawat recalls. “Someone who works in my own home. After 12 years in this field, she had nothing.”

That detail says more about the scale of the information gap than any statistic could.

The thing a card still cannot do

But Ayaan is quick to point out that the e-Shram card is only a beginning, not a solution in itself.

“The card is a kind of soft power for the government,” he says carefully. “It looks good internationally. But if you look at how it actually works, the sign-up process is still extremely complicated, most workers still don’t know it exists, and even after registration, nothing fundamentally changes. Because in Indian law, a home is not considered a formal workplace.”

That final point lies at the centre of the issue.

Because domestic work is not formally recognised under Indian labour law, domestic workers remain excluded from many protections available to other workers — including guaranteed minimum wages, formal grievance systems, and written employment contracts.

Their work depends largely on informal arrangements and personal trust. And when that trust breaks down, there is often no institution to turn to.

Ayaan’s first attempt to address this directly did not succeed. He created simple employment contracts recording agreed wages and payment timelines, and attempted to introduce them within his community. Both employers and workers resisted the idea.

For families who couldn’t attend in person, students were taught to guide their own parents through the e-Shram registration process at home, with booklets sent back in school bags.

Employers were uncomfortable formalising relationships they preferred to keep informal. Workers, worried about jeopardising employment, were hesitant to ask for contracts. Housing society managements also avoided involvement.

“It wasn’t necessarily a success,” Pinky says honestly. “But he’s still working on it, and that’s an essential part of progress in this space.”

The tool he is building now

Alongside his International Baccalaureate coursework and college applications, Ayaan has spent the past year developing an AI-powered WhatsApp chatbot.

The idea is deceptively simple: a domestic worker speaks her employment terms into her phone in Hindi, Marathi or English, and receives a bilingual employment contract she can share with her employer.

No portals. No complicated forms. No advanced digital literacy required beyond sending a voice note.

This month, the project received a major boost. Workers of India was selected for the International Baccalaureate Global Youth Action Fund, a globally competitive programme that received over 1,100 applications from student-led initiatives worldwide. Only 100 projects were selected — and Ayaan’s was among them.

The grant, worth approximately Rs 1.6 lakh, will help him complete the chatbot and expand future workshops.

Even Rawat’s own cook of 12 years had never had an e-Shram card before working with Ayaan — a detail Rawat says captures the scale of the information gap.

His next goal is ambitious but clear: register 2,000 workers by the end of 2026, build a volunteer network beyond Mumbai, and eventually submit a white paper advocating for legal recognition of homes as formal workplaces under Indian labour law.

“That’s the real change,” he says. “Not just a card, but legal standing. The right to exist within the system the way every other worker does.”

The question that started it all

Pinky watches her son speak with the expression of a parent who is both proud and slightly bewildered.

“He’s failed at things,” she says honestly. “The contracts initiative didn’t work. The app isn’t finished. There are still things he’s figuring out.” She smiles. “But he keeps going.”

Ayaan is 17. He has exams this week. He is applying to universities. In many measurable ways, he is still just a teenager.

And yet, 750 workers in Mumbai now have government registrations acknowledging their existence within the welfare system. Hundreds of tribal women across Maharashtra now know about schemes they were always entitled to but had never heard of.

A teenager sat with them one by one, helping them navigate forms, websites, OTPs and paperwork — because two years ago, a woman standing at his front door asked for a loan she should never have had to ask for, and he could not stop thinking about it.

The woman who works in his home now has her e-Shram card. So do 749 others.

Every morning, workers still pass through the gates of apartment buildings across this city. Most still have no contracts, no insurance and no pension. The gap remains enormous, and the work ahead is long.

But the question Ayaan’s work quietly leaves behind — the same question that began at a front door with a loan request and a teenager who could not let it go — now belongs to all of us.

Does she have health insurance?

And if not, what are we doing about it?