Every Indian needs a passport for work. This is why I am building it.

We all scanned something this morning. The auto, the chai, the sabziwala, the electrician's bill. The man who signs the cheques did it and so did the man who carries the cement, and none of us gave it a thought, because we stopped noticing years ago. It is just how money moves now.

Yesterday, at the chai stall near our office in Goregaon, I watched a white shirt with a steel watch and a hand with cement in the creases of its knuckles scan the same sticker a minute apart. Ten rupees each. Then they walked off in opposite directions, and everything the country knows about the work each of them does went with them. One has a LinkedIn page. The other is a first name saved in a few contractors' phones.

I noticed because I spent twenty years building for the man in the white shirt. Gaana was a music player for people who wanted their music the way I wanted mine. Scootsy delivered the best restaurants in Mumbai to households that already had everything, at nine hundred rupees an order while the rest of the market fought over the cheapest meal in the city. I said I was building for India. I was building for the sliver of it I could see from my own window, and I was good at it, because I was the customer.

A week or two after we sold Scootsy to Swiggy, a journalist asked me what I was building next. I gave her a fluent answer. I did not believe a word of it, and I knew it while I was saying it. On the drive home, somewhere on the Sea Link, it occurred to me that I had become very good at solving problems for people exactly like me, and that the country on the other side of the glass had a different problem, an old one, and that nobody I knew was working on it.

Two numbers describe that problem better than I can. Eighty-two percent of Indian employers say they cannot fill the roles they have. Eighty-three percent of the unemployed in this country are under thirty.

"Eighty-two percent of employers cannot fill their roles. Eighty-three percent of the unemployed are under thirty. That is not a shortage."

Six years in the other India

I stepped back from Antfarm in February 2020 to build this. Six weeks later the country locked down and the job market I had decided to fix walked home along the highways, on foot, carrying its children. I have never had a harder six years, or more useful ones. Fixing work in India has beaten governments, foundations and every platform with a Series D, and I now know why. I walked in with the wrong problem.

I thought it was a shortage. Too many people, not enough jobs, so build a better marketplace and let the matching sort it out. That is what you believe when every person you have ever hired arrived with a CV.

The first thing that goes is the idea of one job market. Kerala has the highest youth unemployment in the country, close to thirty percent, and is also the state most fed by work, because the work is in the Gulf; remittances into Kerala passed two lakh crore rupees last year. A young man in Kannur is not looking for a job in Kannur. Gujarat's youth unemployment is three percent and a plant in Sanand cannot keep people past Diwali. Tamil Nadu quietly built the largest female factory workforce in the country, four out of every ten women on an Indian shop floor. Three out of four low-income migrants in Delhi and Mumbai came from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, and what they want from a job is a sister's wedding paid for and a roof that holds. Build for one motive and you will be right about one state.

The second thing that goes is the collar. The rider who started on a borrowed Activa now runs six bikes and does the accounts on his phone. The electrician who wired your kitchen reads the PLC panel at a food plant. The ward nurse runs the rota on WhatsApp. There are perhaps three hundred million jobs like this, hands and head together, and they have no name, no CV format and no visible path from one to the next, because everything we use to describe work was written for the office and the factory and nothing in between.

The third thing that goes is the assumption that most work is formal. Fifty-eight percent of Indian workers are self-employed. Of the salaried minority, the people with what we call proper jobs, fifty-eight percent have no written contract and more than half have no social security of any kind. Formal vocational training reaches four percent of working-age Indians. Santosh Mehrotra, the labour economist who ran the Planning Commission's manpower research institute and wrote the standard book on India's jobs problem, has watched that figure barely move in twenty years while employers complain that nobody is job-ready. Sixty-five percent have never been trained at all, not even on the job.

So how do two hundred million people find work? Through the same people their fathers did. In construction, labour contractors make more than eighty-four percent of the hires. A captain calls his village. A supervisor takes his brother-in-law's neighbour. The referral is India's applicant tracking system, and it has lasted because trust is the only thing about a worker that has ever been legible, and your world stays exactly as large as your uncle's phone book.

Now put the small businesses beside that. There are 7.83 crore of them on Udyam, employing eleven crore people. The cloud kitchen in Andheri needs three people by Monday and hires them from a WhatsApp group and a notebook. Two kilometres away is a young woman who could do the job, does not know the kitchen exists, and has nothing to show the owner that would make him believe she could. He is not short of people. She is not short of work. Neither can see the other.

"The referral is India's applicant tracking system. It has lasted because trust is the only thing about a worker that has ever been legible."

What I built

Kaam.com is a passport for work. Your name first, then everything else.

You claim kaam.com/yourname the way you once claimed a phone number. It gives you a page, a card, a QR and a Verified tick, and the same page serves the electrician and the chairman, because it shapes itself to the person rather than asking the person to become someone it recognises. A fresher in Nashik who has never been paid for anything gets a profile built from what she can already do, the subjects she was good at, the family shop, the Saturday she spent behind a counter, and Kai walks her toward a first job one step at a time. A restaurant captain in Mumbai gets a trade CV and the NRAI's members on the other side of it. A migrant who has just arrived in Pune gets the city on a map, in Hindi, on WhatsApp.

Kai is the part I care most about. It is an assistant that knows who you are, what you need and what you cannot yet put into words, and it lives on WhatsApp because that is where the country already lives. It does not ask a rider to fill in a form. It asks him, in his language, what he did yesterday, and writes the record from his answer. If you cannot type, you speak, and the CV appears. If a job that fits you is posted at two in the morning, it is waiting when you wake, your CV already shaped for that role, with one plain line telling you that you are leaving Kaam to apply.

On the other side of the QR is the shop. Every small business gets its place on the map, a free way to post the three roles it needs by Monday and a mobile applicant tracker that costs nothing, because the man with the notebook is the other half of the passport, not a customer to be sold to. The NRAI brings us hospitality. Mahindra, through Kaabil, brings the women entering work for the first time. The new kaam.com lays all of it out in English, Hinglish and Hindi, and it is the first thing I have shipped in twenty years that was not built for me.

Money had its moment

UPI worked for three reasons, in this order. It was everywhere, one square in every shop. It was interoperable, any app, any bank, one standard. And it was a genuine partnership: a public rail from NPCI, private apps on top, the regulator holding the ring. Remove any one of those and you have another wallet war.

The rest of the stack is already there. Ninety-five percent of adults carry the same twelve-digit Aadhaar. DigiLocker holds seventy-two crore people's certificates. e-Shram, which most of my friends have never heard of, has registered nearly thirty-two crore unorganised workers in five years, more than half of them women, each with a universal account number that so far opens no door. Nandan Nilekani says this infrastructure will turn India "from an informal, low-productivity, multiple set of micro-economies to a formal high-productivity mega economy". He is right about money and identity. Nobody has done it for work.

Work needs the same three conditions. It has to be in the rider's hands as much as the CEO's, or it is another club. It has to travel, so the profile a woman builds in Tiruppur can be read by a hospital in Kochi, by a QR on a shop door in Nashik and, one day, by e-Shram itself. And no company and no ministry can build it alone. Government holds trust and reach. Builders hold speed and the last mile. Kaam is the private layer, made to plug into the public one.

Why this year

Timing is the lesson I have paid most for, so I am careful with it.

AI is thinning the bottom of the white-collar pyramid as I write. TCS announced around twelve thousand mid and senior exits this year, Infosys, Wipro and HCL followed, and campus hiring at the big IT firms has fallen by more than half. NITI Aayog's own roadmap puts more than sixty percent of formal jobs at risk of automation by 2030. The jobs that carried a middle-class India's ambitions for thirty years are shrinking, and the same technology is raising the value of every job that needs a person physically in the room. The collars are about to blur faster than any HR form can follow, and the people crossing them need a record that crosses with them.

The clock matters too. India's dependency ratio bottoms out around 2030, the year the country will have the most working hands per dependent it will ever have. The comfortable claim that twelve million Indians join the workforce every year stopped being true in 2005; the honest figure is under half of that. There is no slack for a generation that arrives with a degree and no way to show what it can do.

And the people who could most use these tools are the ones who cannot reach them. Four in ten Indians go online in English. Ninety-eight percent read and watch in their own languages. Every serious AI product is built for the ten percent who type fast in English and know what to ask. The electrician in Lucknow has the same phone as the founder in Indiranagar and none of the same help. The rails to change that arrived only recently. Data fell from three hundred rupees a gigabyte to almost nothing in 2016. Five hundred and fifty million Indians live on WhatsApp. In February, Sarvam shipped voice-first models built here that speak all twenty-two scheduled languages. The government is putting a lakh crore behind 1.92 crore people getting a formal first job. Everything the partnership needs is on the table, and whoever builds the identity layer for the next half a billion workers will only get to build it once.

Standing up

The part of Scootsy that matters most now is the part the press never covered. We put our riders in uniforms good enough that customers asked where to buy them. We paid them a salary on the first of the month, with the benefits and the rights that came with being ours. We opened channels into the slums around our hubs so a boy who had never held a job could be trained in days and be earning thirty thousand rupees a month within weeks. When someone asked our riders what they did, they had a sentence, and they said it standing up. Our service was the best in the city for exactly that reason.

The taboo around work in this country was never about the work itself. Nobody looks down on a plumber in Munich. The taboo is about whether the work leaves a trace: something that can be shown, added to and carried to the next place. Without the trace every job is a dead end. With it the same job is a first step.

Anil Agarwal came to Mumbai at nineteen with two thousand rupees and traded scrap metal before he built Vedanta. The man who runs this country tells of helping at his father's tea stall as a boy. We repeat these stories as proof that the ladder exists, and then hand the next boy at the next tea stall a form with a box for current designation and nothing for who he is.

Your passport does not ask what you do for a living. The rail your money moves on treats a ten-rupee chai and a ten-crore transfer as the same event. Work is the last document in this country that still sorts people into boxes and dares them to climb out.

The two men at the chai stall already share one square. I am building the second.

It starts with your name. Go and claim it.

Rishi Khiani is the founder of Kaam.com. He previously founded Antfarm and Scootsy, and ran Times Internet.

Sources & references 30

Every Indian needs a passport for work. This is why I am building it.

Six years in the other India

What I built

Money had its moment

Why this year

Standing up

The rise and rise of AI — and what it means for the Indian workforce

How more women in the workforce will get India to its next trillion

The new job roles emerging across hospitality, retail and the gig economy