Mohammad Arif, a wedding singer from Meerut who is paralysed below the waist, has had no work since the Covid second wave hit in early summer.

The 48-year-old father of five used to sing at weddings sitting in a chair and earned about Rs 7,500 a month. His wife Sayeeda, who has a paralysed right arm, is a homemaker.

Arif is happy that the Centre will on Thursday start registering informal workers to create a long-awaited national database, but said the government “must also ensure that workers, particularly urban workers, get work”.

“The database is a good initiative. But there should also be job schemes for the urban poor,” he said.

Labour minister Bhupender Yadav on Tuesday launched the logo of the new portal for the creation of the National Database of Unorganised Workers (NDUW). A presentation made at the meeting said every registered worker would get a unique 12-digit number and be linked to the government’s social security schemes.

The huge exercise, which aims to register the country’s estimated 38 crore unorganised-sector workers, will be spearheaded by the states in collaboration with the trade unions.

Tapan Sen from CPM workers’ wing Citu said several past laws like the Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act, 1979, and the Building and Other Construction Workers Act, 1996, too mandated the registration of all the workers in their domains but were never implemented properly.

The absence of such registration had deepened the stranded migrant workers’ misery during last year’s lockdown, hobbling efforts to reach them with food and relief.

“This database is being created because of a Supreme Court directive,” Sen said. He cautioned that the government should do everything to make the database thorough, especially with the apex court having set a short deadline of December 31 for its completion.

Ashok Singh of Congress labour arm Intuc too said the government should start a job scheme for urban people on the lines of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act.

“Unorganised-sector workers, including migrant workers, make up 90 per cent of the workforce. A database of workers is important,” he said.

“But some income assurance opportunities too must be started to help them during a lean period,” Singh said.

A parliamentary standing committee on labour has supported the idea of an urban employment scheme similar to the MGNREGA.

Amarjeet Kaur, a leader of CPI labour arm Aituc, said the government must not rely on the existing but incomplete databases maintained by its workers’ boards.

“The existing data with the construction workers’ board or the beedi workers’ federation cover only 10 to 15 per cent of the workers in these fields,” she said. “The new database should be a fresh exercise covering all.”

Arif got his Ayushman Bharat card just four days ago, three years after the Centre launched the health insurance scheme that aims to cover 10 crore poor families. He hopes the NDUW card will not take that long.