A booming gig economy is formalising India’s labour force

URBAN INDIANS, more than most people, have become used to getting what they want as soon as they want it, if they have the rupees. Long used to getting their lunch delivered by tiffin wallahs, these days party snacks, a new iPhone or a single bar of soap can be at urbanites’ doorsteps within minutes. The secret behind the country’s gig-economy boom? A virtually unlimited pool of cheap labour. Local-delivery apps like Blinkit, BigBasket and Zepto rely on a hard-pressed army of gig workers. Swiggy, a food-delivery app, claims that on New Year’s Eve 2025 its drivers collectively travelled eight times the distance from the Earth to the Moon and back.

But nothing is easy, and this army of gig workers, set to expand from 7.7m in 2020-2021 to 23.5m by 2029-30, according to NITI Aayog, a government think-tank, has fuelled a rancorous national debate about the treatment of the industry’s delivery drivers. Social media are rife with posts and counter-posts about the issue. Undercover journalists and even a politician or two have been signing up in order to expose the allegedly dire working conditions of gig drivers by bicycle and motorbike. One writer reckoned he was earning just 34 rupees (under 40 American cents) per hour after fuel costs, but not accounting for mobile internet charges.

There is little romance to gig work. The algorithm is a ruthless boss, using penalties to rush and discipline drivers. On December 25th some 40,000 riders went on strike in the hopes of safer working conditions, better pay and information about how their algorithms make decisions. Some of them woke up to find themselves blocked in punishment.

But despite all the anecdotes and protests, delivery apps aren’t making Indian workers more miserable. Quite the opposite, suggests a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) comparing gig workers in India, Indonesia and Kenya. It finds that most Indian delivery drivers don’t sign up from full-time formal work; yet more than half of them end up in formal jobs afterwards. The average delivery partner—28, male, driving part-time—uses gig work as a stepping stone to better things. And as it is, monthly net earnings for full-time drivers still outpace those for casual labour.

In fact, gig work is formalising one of the world’s most chaotic labour forces. India is not like Europe or America, blessed with formal economies and tamed by labyrinthine worker protections. In the West, the “flexibility” of gig work has been seen by many as a euphemism for looser, or zero, regulation. In India the opposite is true. More than 90% of jobs are informal to begin with. But public discomfort around the plight of delivery drivers has jolted politicians into regulatory action. Late last year new labour laws granted digital gig workers legal protections and social security. On January 13th India’s labour minister asked delivery-app bosses to drop their common but wildly reckless promises of delivery within ten minutes. In other words, far from intensifying the daily grind of India’s poorer people, gig work has made it a matter of public debate.

As it struggles to absorb 84m youngsters into its workforce over the next decade, India is in a strange position: it is achieving the highest GDP growth figures of any big economy, but 30% of its graduates are jobless. One result is that graduates are less likely to have jobs than much less educated people, who can usually find employment in the informal sectors. Another is that the NBER paper suggests delivery drivers are more likely to have a tertiary degree than the average Indian. While graduates’ own fields are often not hiring, gig work has no barriers to entry. Unnervingly for all on India’s unruly roads, the apps haven’t even been doing a good job of checking gig drivers’ licences. ■