A few years ago, outside the Transport Commissioner’s office in Bandra, thousands of Ola and Uber drivers staged a protest. Their demands were modest: better fares, fair commissions, humane working hours,
and some protection against arbitrary penalties. The official response was revealing. The commissioner reportedly told them he had no jurisdiction. They were not “employees” but “business partners”, entrepreneurs running their own micro-enterprises. Had they been old-style taxi permit holders, he might have been able to help them, since the applicable rules were clear.
That moment was a wake-up call. Not just for cab drivers, but for millions of workers who suddenly discovered that while they bore all the risks of work, they enjoyed almost none of its protections.
What we today call the “gig economy” is often portrayed as a new phenomenon born of apps and algorithms. In reality, it is an old Indian phenomenon wearing a digital mask. Nearly two decades ago, the Arjun Sengupta Committee on the unorganised sector doc-umented a striking fact: close to 64 per cent of the workers in the unorganised sector were self-employed and thus did not have an identifiable employer. This is because they worked for multiple principals over short spells. They were self-employed, casual, piece-rate workers—construction hands, home-based workers, and street vendors. Today’s gig workers are their technological descendants.
Why the protests are erupting now: So why are gig workers protesting now and doing so in a far more organised way? Because the scale and intensity of platform-mediated work have changed the nature of dependence.
Take cab drivers, for instance. Recent protests in Mumbai saw nearly 90 per cent of app-based cabs go off the roads, with drivers demanding fare parity with black-and-yellow taxis, a cap on commissions, welfare boards, and state-level gig worker legisla-tion. Similar anger simmers among food-delivery workers, warehouse pickers, and in-stant-commerce riders. Nationwide strikes have demanded a minimum monthly in-come, regulated work hours, and social security.
At the heart of the unrest is a simple asymmetry. Platforms insist workers are inde-pendent entrepreneurs and business partners. Yet the platforms decide prices, allocate tasks, impose penalties, deactivate accounts, tweak parameters, and constantly change rules through opaque algorithms. Workers, meanwhile, invest their own capital—vehicles, fuel, smartphones, and insurance—and absorb all the downside risk. They do not even have accident cover from the employer, which would be the equivalent of workplace injury cover. This asymmetry cannot be termed as entrepreneurship. It is un-fair risk-shifting from the big to the small.
The defence offered by platform CEOs is familiar: better a precarious livelihood than no livelihood at all; over-regulation will kill innovation. There is some truth here. India needs jobs, and platforms have undeniably expanded access to work hugely. But this ar-gument confuses flexibility with insecurity. A labour market that only creates livelihoods by stripping workers of basic protections and makes them more vulnerable is not a sus-tainable growth model.
Employerless workers find their voice: Historically, labour movements were organised around factories and identifiable employers. Gig workers lack both. They are, in a literal sense, employerless. This is precisely why their collective action matters and in some ways was inevitable. Their organisation is emerging not despite their legal status, but because of it.
When delivery workers log off en masse, or cab drivers strike, they are asserting a fact that the law has been slow to recognise: economic dependence matters more than con-tractual labels. Courts and regulators are beginning to see this. The Bombay High Court’s sharp observations on “total lawlessness” when cab aggregators operated with-out proper licences were as much about passenger safety as about worker vulnerability.
Globally also the tide is turning. The UK supreme court classified Uber drivers as “work-ers” entitled to minimum wages and paid leave. Spain’s Rider Law treats food-delivery riders as employees. Other countries have created intermediate categories—neither full employees nor pure contractors—but with enforceable floors of rights. International evidence converges on one point: flexibility need not mean a vacuum of rights for the workers.
What the new labour codes do and don’t do: India has taken an important first step through the implementation of the four labour codes, especially the Code on Social Se-curity, 2020. For the first time, gig and platform workers are recognised as a distinct category, eligible for state-designed social security schemes. Draft rules now propose thresholds—90 days of work with an aggregator or 120 days across platforms—to quali-fy for benefits such as insurance and health cover.
This recognition is progress, and it matters. Registration through e-Shram, welfare boards, and contributory funds—such as levies on platform turnover—can create a portable safety net. States like Rajasthan and Telangana have moved faster with dedi-cated gig worker legislation.
But we should not overstate what has been achieved. The codes stop short of core la-bour rights: minimum wages, limits on working hours, collective bargaining, or strong protections against arbitrary deactivation. Social security remains largely discretionary and scheme-based. For the majority of the workers whose incomes fluctuate daily and whose accounts can be switched off overnight, this is a very thin shield.
What this means for India’s labour market: The deeper significance of today’s protests lies in what they signal about India’s structural transformation. As the economy grows and formal enterprises expand, employment has paradoxically become more informal. Platforms did not create this trend; they amplified it. The labour market, too, should be moving toward more formalisation.
If India’s future of work is increasingly platform-mediated, then formalisation cannot mean necessitating that everyone will have standard employment contracts, i.e., jobs. It must mean extending a universal floor of rights—minimum pay standards, safety, insur-ance, and due process—to all workers, regardless of how they are classified, whether employees, business partners or self-employed contractors.
Seen this way, gig worker mobilisation is not anti-growth. It is pro-institution. It is a de-mand that markets be embedded in rules, that innovation can coexist with dignity. The Arjun Sengupta Committee argued long ago that growth without security breeds vulner-ability and resentment. That warning echoes loudly today.
The pendulum swung too far in celebrating flexibility while ignoring power. It is now swinging back, slowly and contentiously. The challenge for policymakers is not to kill the gig economy but to civilise it. If India can manage that balance, the gig economy could become a bridge to a more formal, inclusive labour market rather than a cul-de-sac of permanent insecurity and precarity.
That would be real innovation.
Dr Ajit Ranade is a noted Pune-based economist. Syndicate: The Billion Press (email: edi-tor@thebillionpress.org)
