In 2020, a young man from Bihar looked at a labour chowk in Delhi and saw a gap the internet had skipped. Groceries, taxis and even matrimonial services had moved online. Daily-wage hiring had not. Chandrashekhar Mandal decided to change that. He built Digital Labour Chowk, a platform that connects manual labourers with the employers who need them. It now counts more than 1.5 lakh registered workers, according to ThePrint, and roughly Rs 3 crore in funding. And it all started with workers standing in the rain.The Day the Rain Made the Point
Mandal grew up in Darbhanga district in Bihar. Scenes of labourers waiting for work were familiar to him from childhood. The spark came later, in Delhi. YourStory reports that the idea followed a rainy-day encounter with workers waiting for jobs in the capital. He asked himself a simple question. “If groceries, taxis, and even matrimonial services have gone digital, why not labour chowks?” he told YourStory. Before building anything, he did his homework. According to The Better India, he spent over four months assessing labour chowks across Bihar, Noida and Delhi. In 2020, Digital Labour Chowk went live. ThePrint described him as a 29-year-old from Bihar when it profiled the venture last year. He wanted to understand the problem before he tried to fix it. Those four months of fieldwork taught him what workers needed most. Steady work, fair pay, and a way to be found without standing on a road for hours.
Digital Labour Chowk: Built for Workers the Internet Usually Skips
The platform works like a professional network for manual labour. Workers create profiles that list their skills, experience and location. Companies then search those profiles instead of driving to a chowk at dawn. Job seekers are never charged to access opportunities, YourStory reports. The design also handles India’s digital gaps. A worker without a smartphone can simply call the number listed on the site and register by phone. ThePrint met one such worker, Santosh Kumar Shahni, who registered exactly that way. The model is hybrid, too. Alongside the app, the team runs physical kiosks and outreach drives, so the platform reaches men who have never used an app for anything. That mix is deliberate. An app alone would leave out the workers who need the platform most. So the team kept a phone line and a physical presence alongside the digital one.
From Chowk to Paycheque
The worker stories show what the change means in practice. Shahni found work within a month of registering by phone. He also received a labour card and a provident-fund account, formal benefits that casual hiring rarely brings. Another worker, Rohit Deshwal, told ThePrint he found work close to his village. “I am happy I moved near my home. I can save some money, and I get to eat home-cooked food as well,” he said. ThePrint’s reporting is honest about the limits, too. Digital matching helps, but many labourers still depend on chowks, and no app removes the uncertainty of daily work. The point is that workers now have one more option, and it costs them nothing.
A Challenge Win, and Rs 3 Crore of Belief
Recognition arrived in 2022. Digital Labour Chowk won the National Innovation Challenge run by Hitachi India and the Kerala Startup Mission, in the ‘reaching the unreached’ category. That win brought Rs 30 lakh in seed funding, according to ThePrint. More followed. By the time of ThePrint’s report, the company had raised about Rs 3 crore in total. The platform’s scale is reported differently by different outlets. ThePrint credited it with over 1.5 lakh registered workers and more than 10,000 companies hiring. YourStory earlier reported over 2 lakh registrations and more than 40,000 successful job matches. The figures are company-reported, so they carry that caveat. Even at the lower count, the reach is real.
The Wise Take
India’s labour chowks are among the least glamorous places in the economy. Millions of families eat because of them. Mandal did not invent a new technology. He pointed an old one, the internet, at people it had ignored. His best decisions were unglamorous too. Four months of fieldwork, a phone line for workers without apps, and kiosks for those the app would miss. That is the lesson here. A startup does not need a new world to build in. Sometimes it just needs to notice who the current one left standing outside.
Also read our other article on The Fewer, Bigger Bet: What India’s $10.3 Billion Startup Funding Really Says
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