Builder-paid desk that gets site workers welfare cards and keeps them renewed
TL;DR Mortarly runs on-site desks that register construction workers with their state welfare board, keep their cards renewed and chase their claims all the way to payment. Builders and large contractors pay, because they already hold the work records the boards ask for. It narrows a general scheme-finder down to one group that keeps missing out.
Construction workers are owed welfare from a fund their employers already pay into. A cess on building projects has raised about ₹1.13 lakh crore, and nearly ₹63,000 crore of it is sitting unused[2]. About 5.73 crore workers are registered[2], but in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana only about 24 lakh of more than 1 crore workers held an active card in 2021[1].
So what's stopping them? Mostly paperwork. In one survey, 24 of 30 workers in Delhi NCR had never heard of the card. Registration needs at least five documents, including proof of 90 days of work signed by a contractor, and cards lapse when someone misses a renewal[1].
What it does, in regulatory terms: registration and claim assistance only. The state welfare board under the BOCW Act, 1996 decides eligibility and pays every benefit. Mortarly never handles benefit money.
The seed was a general AI eligibility engine, and I've narrowed it down. The national myScheme portal already matches citizens to schemes[4] and one social enterprise has worked with 7.6 million families[3]. For site workers, matching isn't the gap. Paperwork is.
A Mortarly desk visits a site on fixed days. Staff collect documents, fill in the state board's application in the worker's language, and get the 90-day work certificate signed by the builder's site office that same week. A simple tracker flags renewals 60 days before expiry and logs each claim, say a child's education grant, until the money lands. The builder gets a monthly report of active cards on its sites. Workers pay nothing.
Workers benefit, and builders and large labour contractors pay a per-site monthly fee from labour-welfare, ESG or CSR budgets. There's no public price for this service, so working out the price is part of validation. Developers who report worker welfare to lenders or listed-company shareholders are the warmest buyers. State boards could pay later, since unused funds are a known problem[2].
A 2025 workshop of the V.V. Giri National Labour Institute and Indus Action recommended auto-renewing cards from digital work records[2], and that favours whoever already keeps those records on site. The DPDP Rules, notified in November 2025, set the consent rules for handling workers' documents[5].
There is no public market figure for welfare registration services. The firm numbers are the unused ₹63,000 crore in cess funds and 5.73 crore registered workers[2]. On the adjacent side, that social enterprise reports ₹18,800 crore in benefits reached across all schemes and groups[3]. That shows demand for assisted access, not the size of this niche.
Scheme-access social enterprises train field agents to help families claim schemes and sell to governments, CSR and companies[3]. NGOs such as Indus Action work on BOCW policy[2]. myScheme is a free government search tool[4]. None of them sits on a building site with the builder as the paying customer. That spot, plus the builder's signature on the work certificate, is your gap.
| Difficulty | Moderate (40/100) |
| Starting capital | ₹35–70 L |
| Time to launch | 4–6 months |
The tech is light. The hard parts are running field staff across lots of sites, learning each state board's rules and fees, and getting builders to pay for something they see as optional. Migrant workers who move states lose their registration, so keeping them on your books is hard.
Mortarly needs no licence of its own, but it works entirely inside the state welfare board's rules.
Building this outside India? The categories above usually have a local equivalent, so check with your own regulator.
Don't let AI decide whether a worker qualifies for a benefit. The welfare board decides eligibility and pays, and a misread document can sink a genuine claim.
Want to work out the AI layer for Mortarly? Talk to Yash →
I like this for a founder with labour-sector or NGO field experience who can sell to real-estate developers. If you're hoping for software margins then it is a poor fit. Prove first that one mid-size developer will pay for three months and that at least half of the cards you file get approved.
Plan for roughly ₹35–70 L, mostly on field staff and site visits. The software can stay simple.
No separate licence. You follow your state board's BOCW rules, the DPDP Act for workers' documents, and you never charge workers a fee.
Possibly, wherever construction workers have benefit schemes they struggle to claim. Check how local schemes accept help from third parties and your local data protection law.
The free Mortarly validation kit has the line-by-line capital breakdown, the effort scoring, the welfare-board and data-protection checklist, a 14-day validation sprint with pass/fail targets, a 90-day launch plan, 10 interview questions for builders and workers, and 5 assumptions to test. Download the kit →
Thinking about building Mortarly or something close to it? The make-or-break bit is getting a developer to pay for worker welfare it has never been asked to fund, and I'm happy to help you sharpen that pitch. If you need a hand, you know where to find me. Talk to Yash →
For illustration only. Names are fictional and ideas hypothetical; sourced facts are real but may be out of date. Nothing here is legal, financial or professional advice, and Yash Khatri is not personally liable for any use of it. Read the full disclaimer.