The Gig Economy : A Reality Check  April 4th 2025

The Gig Economy in 2024-25-- Ground Realities

Gig workers are high on the Government’s latest list of welfare beneficiaries. Budget 2025 announced health cover for them under the PM Jan Aarogya Yojana. In February the Ministry of Labour and Employment said it would soon introduce a policy to offer pension benefits to gig workers through the EPFO. The pension will be transaction-based and funded by aggregators, providing a retirement fund for gig workers.

With onboarding of ten major e-commerce players, including Uber, Zomato, and Blinkit, it is assumed that this means more than 70,000 gig workers have registered with the eShram portal to avail several social security benefits. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Labour says nearly 35 lakh workers will be eligible to register for eShram in 2025-26, so more should be identified and onboarded on the portal.

Meanwhile, there is the ground reality. A number of surveys appeared in the course of the past year exploring the precarities of the gig economy in India. (Links below.)

An October 2024 study by the Centre for Internet and Society, based on survey data collected in 2021-22 covered key employment indicators for this sector. It found that In Mumbai, over 64% of gig workers were in salaried employment previously, and this was also the case for over 50% of workers in Guwahati, and over 42% of workers in Delhi-NCR. In Lucknow and Delhi-NCR, pandemic-driven unemployment was a key driver for a staggering proportion of workers who joined platform work as a distress employment source. Over 30% of workers in Lucknow and Delhi-NCR were previously unemployed.

Across cities, earnings for delivery workers were considerably lower than those for taxi workers. When earnings were adjusted for standard weekly work hours (48 hours/week), over 50% of delivery workers in Mumbai, Guwahati, and Lucknow were earning less than the corresponding state-wise minimum wages. Platform work was also insufficient in meeting essential living needs for taxi workers in Mumbai, Guwahati, and Lucknow. Around 30% of taxi workers (23% in Guwahati) were earning less than minimum wages, and around 50% (80% in Mumbai) were earning less than estimated living wages. Earnings for both delivery and taxi workers in Delhi-NCR were substantially lower than minimum wage and living wage standards. Meanwhile Uber announced In May 2024 that it now had more than 1 million drivers in India.

Other studies published in the course of the year documented how gig workers were impacted by extreme heat, how social security benefits intended for them actually performed, and the sensitivity of state governments to their needs. Health insurance existed in principle, but did not deliver. A govt accident insurance scheme for gig workers in Hyderabad did not deliver when a worker was badly injured. And a reporter talked to 40 workers for Swiggy in India who said that health insurance and other benefits offed by this food delivery app to their riders changed weekly depending on the quality and quantity of work.

'Prisoners on Wheels?' a March 2024 report that surveyed over 10,000 cab drivers & delivery persons on apps across 8 cities also revealed that caste disparity is as much a part of the gig economy in India as long work hours and poor pay. Around 63 percent of cab drivers from the Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) communities work more than 14 hours a day, while only 16 percent of app-based drivers from the unreserved category work such long hours.

The state governments of Rajasthan and Karnataka introduced laws for the welfare of gig workers and to protect their rights. As of September last year NGOs and gig worker unions were urging the Rajasthan government to implement the bill passed in 2023. The Karnataka Government’s welfare bill for gig workers called Karnataka Platform Based Gig Workers (Social. Security and Welfare) Act, 2024 is yet to be passed.