Awareness and Utilisation of BOCW Welfare Board Benefits among Construction Workers: A Field Study in Bengaluru

India's building workers are protected by one of the most generously funded welfare frameworks in the unorganised sector: the Building and Other Construction Workers (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act, 1996 and the Welfare Cess Act, 1996, which levy a cess on construction cost to finance state welfare boards. Karnataka's board runs schemes for medical treatment, children's education, marriage assistance, maternity support, accident relief, pension and funeral expenses. Yet on any Bengaluru worksite, most workers cannot name two of these schemes, many are not registered, and utilisation is thin — the protection exists on paper and stalls at the last mile.

This dissertation studies that gap. Across three construction sites of different scales in Bengaluru, it measures workers' awareness of welfare-board benefits, their registration status (with the board and on the national e-Shram portal) and their actual utilisation of at least one benefit, and examines the barriers — proof of ninety days of work, identity documentation, migration, and contractor intermediation — that stand between entitlement and access. Key-informant interviews with a board facilitation-centre official, a site supervisor and an NGO field coordinator triangulate the worker data.

The study uses a Kannada interview schedule, anonymised coding (no identity documents are recorded), and SPSS analysis with chi-square tests of association. It closes with a micro social-action deliverable — an awareness camp with referral of unregistered workers — so the field work leaves something behind instead of only extracting data.

Construction workers in Bengaluru are covered by a welfare framework that few of them experience: boards with substantial cess funds on one side, and on the other, workers who migrate between sites, hold fragmented proof of employment and rarely hear of a scheme until a crisis arrives. The result is a persistent gap between entitlement and access — eligible workers remain unregistered, registered workers do not know what they can claim, and benefits such as medical assistance or children's education support go unused by the very population that pays for them through the cess embedded in every building they raise. Field-level evidence on how much workers actually know, how many are registered, and what specifically blocks registration and utilisation is thin, localised and dated. Without such evidence, social workers, boards and NGOs cannot target the weakest link — awareness, documentation or delivery. This study measures that gap directly on three Bengaluru sites and converts the findings into a social-action response.

Abstract

Construction employs one of the largest segments of India's unorganised workforce, and the BOCW Acts of 1996 place a dedicated welfare architecture around it. This dissertation examines how much of that architecture actually reaches workers on Bengaluru sites. Using a structured Kannada interview schedule with about 120 workers across three sites of different scale, supported by key-informant interviews and an observation of a welfare-board facilitation centre, the study measures awareness, registration and utilisation, tests their association with workers' characteristics, and identifies the dominant barriers. It ends with an awareness camp and referrals as a social-action component.

Introduction: the policy context

The BOCW Act, 1996 requires registration of workers who have completed eighteen years but not sixty, and who have worked at least ninety days in building or construction work during the preceding twelve months. The Welfare Cess Act, 1996 funds state boards through a cess of one to two per cent of construction cost, currently levied at one per cent. The Karnataka Building and Other Construction Workers' Welfare Board administers benefits such as medical assistance for major ailments (Karmika Chikitsa Bhagya), educational assistance for workers' children (Kalike Bhagya), marriage assistance (Gruha Lakshmi Bond), maternity support, accident relief, pension and funeral expenses. Separately, the Ministry of Labour and Employment's e-Shram portal, launched in August 2021, registers unorganised workers aged 16–59 in a national database meant to connect them to social-security schemes.

The gap this study addresses

Audits and newspaper reports repeatedly find low registration relative to the estimated worker population, but student-level, ward-level evidence is rare. Why does a registered worker not use a scheme? Why does an eligible worker not register — documentation, migration, the ninety-day proof across multiple employers, or simple unawareness? Worker-side data on these questions, with policy-side views from the board and NGOs, is exactly what a labour-welfare dissertation can contribute.

Proposed study

• A cross-sectional field study at three purposively selected sites: a large private residential project, an infrastructure worksite and a small-contractor site.
• A structured interview schedule in Kannada covering socio-demographics, board and e-Shram registration, awareness of each benefit, utilisation, and barrier items.
• Key-informant interviews (board facilitation-centre official, site supervisor, NGO field coordinator) and a short observation of the facilitation-centre process.
• SPSS analysis: descriptives, awareness indices, and chi-square tests of association.
• A social-action deliverable: an on-site awareness camp with the board's materials and referral of willing unregistered workers to the facilitation centre.

Feasibility

The college's existing field-work ties and the board's public facilitation centres make access realistic; the schedule is short enough for a lunch-break interview; costs are limited to printing and travel; and the design is observational, so the ethical load is consent, anonymity and referral rather than clinical risk.

In scope

• Construction workers aged 18–60 working at three purposively selected sites in Bengaluru (large private project, infrastructure worksite, small-contractor site).
• Awareness, registration (board and e-Shram) and utilisation measured through a structured Kannada interview schedule.
• Key-informant interviews with a board facilitation-centre official, a site supervisor and an NGO field coordinator.
• One awareness camp and a short findings note shared with the board facilitation centre and the college.

Out of scope

• Workers below 18 or above 60, and workers on sites where the engineer withholds permission.
• Verification of benefit disbursement records or an audit of the board's finances — the study is worker-side, not financial.
• Contract labour law compliance at the sites (Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act and related statutes are background, not measured).
• Longitudinal tracking of whether referred workers actually complete registration.

Design: descriptive cross-sectional field study with a triangulated, multi-source method (worker survey + key informants + observation), following the college's research-ethics process and permissions from site engineers and the welfare board's facilitation centre.

Sampling: three sites purposively selected to represent different scales and employment arrangements; within each site, consecutive sampling of adult workers (18–60 years, at least six months in the trade) until about 120 interviews, distributed roughly 50 / 40 / 30 across the three sites.

Instruments: (1) a structured interview schedule in Kannada — socio-demographics, migration status, trade and work history, board and e-Shram registration, aided awareness of each benefit from a checklist drawn from the board's published scheme list, utilisation, and barrier items; (2) key-informant guides; (3) a facilitation-centre observation note (documents demanded, steps, time taken, help available). The schedule is translated and back-translated and pre-tested on ten workers at a fourth, non-study site.

Analysis plan: frequencies and cross-tabulations for registration and utilisation; a simple awareness score (one point per correctly identified benefit) summarised as means by site; chi-square tests for awareness versus duration in the trade, site type and migration status at p < 0.05. All records carry study codes only — no names, Aadhaar or any government ID number is ever recorded.

The study design runs from policy mapping to social action, as the flowchart below shows.

flowchart TD
  A["Policy mapping: BOCW Act 1996, Cess Act 1996, board schemes, e-Shram"] --> B["Schedule drafted and translated to Kannada"]
  B --> C["Back-translation + pre-test on 10 workers at a non-study site"]
  C --> D["Permissions: college research cell, site engineers, board facilitation centre"]
  D --> E["Worker survey: about 120 interviews at 3 sites of different scale"]
  D --> F["Key informants: board official, site supervisor, NGO coordinator"]
  D --> G["Observation of facilitation-centre registration process"]
  E --> H["Coding in Excel - study codes only, no ID documents recorded"]
  F --> H
  G --> H
  H --> I["SPSS: descriptives, awareness score, chi-square at p < 0.05"]
  I --> J["Dissertation + findings note to board and college"]
  I --> K["Social action: awareness camp + referrals of unregistered workers"]

The conceptual frame follows the entitlement chain that the study measures, link by link:

flowchart LR
  P["Entitlement: BOCW Act + cess-funded board schemes"] --> R["Registration: welfare board + e-Shram"]
  R --> W["Awareness: workers know what they can claim"]
  W --> U["Utilisation: a benefit actually claimed and received"]
  B["Barriers: 90-day proof, documents, migration, contractor intermediation"] -.->|"breaks the chain"| R
  B -.-> W
  B -.-> U

Two design choices carry the dissertation. First, triangulation: worker self-report is checked against the facilitation-centre observation and the informants, so the barriers identified are not one side's story. Second, the social-action component is built into the design rather than bolted on — the study ends by returning knowledge to the site, which is what distinguishes social-work field research from a survey carried out by any other discipline.

• Registration-drive action research: partner with the board and an NGO to run facilitated registration camps, and measure conversion from referral to registration — turning this descriptive study into an intervention.
• Women construction workers: a focused study on maternity and health benefits, childcare at sites and the gendered barriers to registration.
• Inter-state migrants: trace how workers moving between states lose continuity of the ninety-day proof and what a portable record would change.
• e-Shram linkage: study how board registration and e-Shram registration interact in practice, and whether the national database reduces documentation burdens.
• Scheme-utilisation follow-up: a longitudinal panel of referred workers to measure how many actually complete registration and claim a first benefit within a year.