Union Labour and Sports Minister Mansukh Mandaviya held bilateral meetings with his counterparts from the UAE, Russia, Indonesia, and Iran on the sidelines of the 12th BRICS Labour and Employment Ministers' Meeting on Wednesday, 15 July 2026, deliberating on digital solutions to build more inclusive and efficient labour markets.

Context

Minister Mandaviya described the meetings as 'productive,' with discussions centred on harnessing digital tools to expand social protection and improve employment services. He used the platform to showcase two of India's flagship labour-sector portals — e-Shram and the National Career Service (NCS) portal — as pioneering Digital Public Infrastructure, or DPI, models capable of driving international labour mobility.

The meetings with counterparts from four BRICS-affiliated nations signal India's intent to position its digital labour architecture as a replicable template for developing economies within the grouping.

Policy Backdrop

e-Shram, launched in August 2021, is a centralised national database for unorganised-sector workers, linking over 30 crore registered workers to social-security schemes through a unique identification number. The National Career Service portal, operational since 2015, modernised India's legacy employment exchanges by offering job-matching, career counselling, and apprenticeship services at scale.

India had previously elevated its DPI stack — encompassing Aadhaar, UPI, DigiLocker, and labour portals — as a global public good during its G20 Presidency in 2023, advocating for their adoption across the Global South. The BRICS Labour Ministers' forum, which has convened annually since 2015, has increasingly served as a venue for India to advance this agenda among emerging-economy peers.

The bilateral with the UAE carries particular weight: the Gulf nation is one of the largest destinations for Indian migrant workers, and existing bilateral agreements on worker protection and recruitment make the labour-mobility dimension of the discussions directly consequential for millions of Indian workers abroad.

Stakeholders and Impact

The primary beneficiaries of the frameworks being discussed are India's unorganised-sector and migrant workers, who stand to gain from improved portability of social-security entitlements and streamlined overseas employment pathways. BRICS labour ministries collectively represent economies that host and export significant shares of the global workforce.

Mandaviya also highlighted the potential of BRICS CONNECT — a platform under discussion among BRICS labour ministries — to foster joint skilling programmes, workforce-data sharing, and digital innovation across member states. The emphasis on south-south cooperation aligns with India's broader demographic-dividend strategy, as the country seeks structured channels to deploy its young workforce in Eurasian and Gulf labour markets.

For partner nations, India's DPI models offer a low-cost, scalable blueprint for formalising informal labour and delivering social protection without building expensive physical infrastructure.

What's Next

Attention will now turn to whether the bilateral conversations translate into formal outcome documents, memoranda of understanding, or pilot projects — particularly under the BRICS CONNECT framework — at the next full BRICS summit or a follow-up labour-ministers session. Progress on a mutual-recognition arrangement for skilling credentials between India and partner nations would be a concrete marker of the cooperation taking shape.

India's sustained push to internationalise its labour DPI stack suggests that agreements emerging from these sideline meetings could shape the next phase of overseas employment policy and worker-welfare diplomacy well beyond the BRICS grouping.