Eight million Indians drive cabs, deliver food, deliver groceries, and ride bikes for app-based platforms. They work twelve to fourteen hour days. They earn, on average, less than the statutory minimum wage when you subtract fuel and depreciation on their vehicles. They have no provident fund, no health insurance, no paid leave, no collective bargaining rights, and no legal status that obligates their platforms to any of those things. This is not a marginal corner of the Indian labour market. It is the fastest-growing employment category in the country, and the people doing the work are, by any honest measure, being used up and discarded.
I have spent the last four months talking to gig riders in Bengaluru, Delhi, and Jaipur for a reporting project, and the pattern is consistent across platforms and cities. Men in their late twenties, migrants from smaller towns, working 70 to 90 hours a week, taking home the equivalent of a full-time minimum wage job in the formal sector, with none of the protections that minimum wage job would carry. This is the story of how India’s gig economy got this big this fast, what was supposed to protect these workers, why that protection has not arrived, and what a realistic safety net would actually look like.
The scale of what we are talking about
NITI Aayog’s 2022 report estimated 7.7 million gig workers in India as of the 2020-21 financial year, with a projection of 23.5 million by 2029-30. Subsequent industry estimates put the 2025 figure closer to 10 to 12 million. The share of gig work in services employment has more than doubled in five years. If projections hold, gig work will be the single largest category of new job creation in urban India for the rest of the decade.
The dominant platforms are familiar names. Ola and Uber for cab driving. Swiggy and Zomato for food delivery. BigBasket, Blinkit, Zepto, and Instamart for grocery and quick commerce. Amazon and Flipkart for last-mile logistics. Rapido for motorcycle rides. Dozens of smaller platforms for urban services, plumbing, electrical work, housekeeping, beauty services.
The demographics are overwhelmingly male, though beauty and housekeeping platforms have significant female workforces, disproportionately migrant from smaller towns and rural districts, median age 28, median education some secondary schooling, median monthly earnings after expenses around Rs 15,000 to Rs 20,000 in metros and lower elsewhere. To put that number in context, a full-time ESI-registered worker at the same wage level would carry about Rs 4,500 per month in effective social security benefits. The gig worker gets zero.
The legal status question
The central question in gig worker policy is whether an app-based rider is an “employee” or an “independent contractor.” Indian labour law is built around the former. If a Swiggy delivery rider is an employee, Swiggy owes provident fund, ESI, gratuity, paid leave, and a host of other obligations. If the rider is a contractor, Swiggy owes them a fee per delivery and nothing else.
The platforms’ position is uniform: riders are “partners,” not employees. They are free to log in or out. They can work for competitors simultaneously. The platform is a marketplace connecting independent contractors to customers. Worker organizations argue this is a fiction. Riders have no pricing power, the platform sets the rates. They are penalized for low acceptance of orders. They are deactivated without due process. The platform controls the algorithm that determines their earnings and their visibility to customers.
Is that a marketplace relationship or is it supervision and control? I know which side I come down on, and the legal test for employment in Indian case law has historically favoured the control view. But the courts have not definitively settled the question. Various state-level labour tribunals have ruled in favour of individual gig workers on individual facts. No central ruling has resolved the status question for the industry as a whole, and the longer that takes, the more workers enter the system under the contractor assumption.
The Code on Social Security, 2020, and its unimplemented promises
Parliament passed the Code on Social Security in September 2020, one of the four labour codes that consolidated decades of previous legislation. For the first time, Indian labour law defined a “gig worker” and a “platform worker” as distinct categories and provided for their social security. This was a meaningful legislative move, genuinely, and it created an opening that did not exist before.
The Code requires the central and state governments to frame schemes for gig and platform workers covering life and disability insurance, accident insurance, health and maternity benefits, old age protection, and creche benefits. It also provides for a Social Security Fund to be built from contributions by aggregators, meaning the platforms themselves, at a rate of 1 to 2 percent of their annual turnover or 5 percent of the aggregate amount paid to workers.
This is a substantial framework. And it has not been operationalised in any meaningful sense.
Five years after the Code was passed, the scheme-level rules have not been notified by the central government. The Social Security Fund is not collecting. The platforms are not contributing. The workers are not receiving benefits. Successive annual budgets have not allocated the matching contribution the central government committed to when the Code passed. This is, at this point, a policy failure measurable in years and in the lives of workers who could have been receiving coverage the whole time. The tools that might help citizens push for implementation exist, including the RTI Act and the appeal mechanism to Information Commissioners, but most gig workers do not have the time, information, or organizational backing to use them.
The Rajasthan experiment, the only state law that has actually shipped
In 2023, Rajasthan became the first Indian state to pass standalone gig worker legislation, the Rajasthan Platform-Based Gig Workers (Registration and Welfare) Act. The Act requires platforms operating in the state to register their gig workers with the state government, contribute a fee of up to 2 percent of the payment per transaction to a Welfare Fund, and abide by a grievance redressal mechanism run by the state labour department.
The Act was passed. It has been partially implemented. A Welfare Fund is operational. Registration is ongoing, if uneven. Enforcement against non-complying platforms has been inconsistent. It is not enough, and any gig worker advocate in Jaipur will tell you so in detail. But it is the most substantive gig worker law operational anywhere in India, and other states, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, have floated similar proposals. Karnataka’s draft is the most advanced of the pending bills and could become law in 2026.
Why has the state-level approach produced more action than the central law? The answer most activists give is that state governments are closer to the workers, answerable to urban voters who see gig workers every day, and less captured by the platform lobby’s central-government-level influence operations.
What platforms actually pay, in numbers
A representative earnings structure for a Swiggy or Zomato rider in a metro: base pay per delivery Rs 35 to Rs 50, plus a distance-based increment, plus customer tip where given. Effective per-order earnings are Rs 45 to Rs 80 gross. After fuel, about Rs 10 to Rs 15 per order on an average 4 kilometre round trip, phone data charges, vehicle wear, and occasional repair costs, net earnings per order are frequently under Rs 30.
Riders need to complete 30 to 40 orders per day to make the statutory minimum wage of a metro unskilled worker. That is 12 to 14 hours on the road, in Indian city traffic, often on two-wheelers, often without proper helmets or reflective gear because the platform does not supply them. In practice most riders do fewer orders than the math demands and earn less than the minimum wage they are theoretically working toward. This is before the platform takes commission, which is sometimes opaque and sometimes visible depending on the app’s earnings breakdown screen.
The safety problem nobody is solving
More than 90 percent of gig riders have no health insurance of any kind. Accidents are frequent, Indian roads are among the deadliest in the world, and the incentive structures on quick-commerce platforms specifically reward faster deliveries in ways that push riders toward unsafe behaviour. When a rider is injured on a delivery, the platform’s obligation extends only to a limited accident insurance policy whose terms vary by platform and whose claim process is, by worker accounts, slow and often disputed.
The 2023 death of a Zepto rider in Bengaluru, hit by a speeding SUV while racing to complete a 10-minute delivery, triggered one of the larger gig worker protests in recent years. The rider’s family received a settlement reported at Rs 2 lakh. The family of an employee in a comparable formal-sector role would be entitled to substantially more under ESI. The maths is clear, and it is not in the workers’ favour.
What a real safety net would actually look like
In the absence of full employment status, which the platforms will fight in court for the rest of this decade, there is an intermediate model that has worked elsewhere and could work here. I do not have to invent this framework, it exists in California’s Proposition 22, in the UK’s Uber worker ruling, and in various European Union directives now working through implementation.
- Portable benefits. Social security that follows the worker, not the employer. A provident fund account contributed to by every platform the worker does gigs for, accumulated over the worker’s career regardless of which apps they use.
- Aggregator contribution floor. A fixed percentage of gross platform revenue, 2 to 5 percent, into the social security fund, similar to the Rajasthan model but with teeth for enforcement.
- Accident and health insurance at real limits. Not the Rs 2 lakh accident cover that most platforms currently offer. Proper health coverage benchmarked to ESI or equivalent, including hospitalization and outpatient care.
- Algorithmic transparency. Workers can see how their ratings, deactivation probability, and pay are calculated. Right now these are proprietary black boxes that workers are expected to optimize against without understanding.
- Deactivation due process. A platform cannot permanently deactivate a worker without a stated reason and a meaningful appeal mechanism. This is a basic procedural protection that employment law takes for granted.
- Collective bargaining rights. The legal ability to form worker associations and negotiate with platforms, which is currently murky because of the contractor classification.
None of this requires reclassifying workers as employees. All of it is compatible with the “partner” structure the platforms prefer. What it requires is political will and enforcement, and neither has been in generous supply. The organizational infrastructure for building that will, much of it rooted in the same grassroots media networks that reach rural India, is trying to extend itself into urban gig worker organizing, with uneven results.
Why this matters beyond the eight million riders
The gig economy is the leading edge of a broader shift in Indian employment. More than 80 percent of Indian workers are in the informal sector with no social security at all. Gig work is informal employment with a VC-funded app layered on top, and the policy question of how to protect gig workers is the same policy question, in miniature, as how to protect the country’s agricultural labourers, construction workers, and the 10 million street food vendors who feed urban India every day.
If India cannot build a social safety net for the gig economy, which is visible, urban, and politically salient in the largest cities, it will not build one for the far larger informal workforce that remains the majority of the country. This is the test case, and the answer so far is not encouraging. But it is not settled. Rajasthan shows a path. The Code on Social Security provides a framework that only needs implementation. What is missing is the political will to put rules on paper and actually enforce them. Eight million workers are waiting on it, and the longer the wait, the harder the politics will get.