Why chest-thumping about gig job growth misses the point

WHAT’S THE HURRY? Elsewhere, fast deliveries mean 15-30 mins. Only in India is the timeline under 10 minsEvery year, as urban India ushers in the first day of January in a blur of beats and booze, thousands of invisible young men on two-wheelers quietly power the night’s merriment.

This New Year’s Eve, they weren’t so quiet or invisible. Over one lakh gig workers joined a nationwide protest striking work on the busiest day of the doorstep-delivery economy. While the draft rules for new labour codes introduced by the Centre in November 2025 are intended to bring some relief to gig workers by making the provision of social security by tech platforms mandatory, several other problems pertaining to this relatively new form of work remain unaddressed. These include:

Long hours, falling pay: Delivery workers rush around in traffic and pollution for 12-14 hours a day and yet complain that their per-order incomes are falling. While platform commissions have been rising over the years, workers face increasing fuel costs and penalties (for example, if a delivery is delayed). A minimum monthly wage would protect the workers from economic vagaries and erratic demand, a template implemented by a large online retailer operating in our neighbouring countries.

Tyranny of 10 minutes: A professor I met to discuss the gig economy asked me a simple but profound question. “Why is quickness a virtue? Why do you need your groceries in 10 minutes? These are false values masquerading as virtues.” This need for speed is ironic because Indian consumers are no strangers to slow deliveries. Pre-liberalisation, they have waited for months for a phone line or gas connection. We are thankfully out of that era. But we have zoomed to the other end of the spectrum, to a new tech-driven era of heady consumption. Tapping away on our phone, we are barely aware that the lightning service of under 10 minutes is provided by human labour. Someone races from the warehouse to our door, bearing our bread and milk, just so that we don’t have to go to the corner grocery store. Such blink-of-an-eye delivery increases the risk of accidents and puts the worker under stress. Though workers are not penalised for delays in delivery, speed is a key performance metric for the workers and in gated societies, slow lifts and delays in permissions add to time taken even if the dark store is nearby. Workers hurry to meet their targets to be able to earn more and have a shot at incentives.

Where is the human in the loop? As customers, we are often frustrated when a bot appears on a website and gives a templated response with no understanding of context. Well, so are gig workers, who are on-boarded, trained, monitored, rewarded, reprimanded and off-loaded only through an app. An entire professional life cycle of a gig worker can be over without ever having a conversation with a human supervisor. This near-dystopian way of work fails spectacularly, and even poignantly, when the worker has a grievance. Platforms de-bar workers from the app if a customer rates them poorly or a delivery is delayed. When workers want to contest a decision and present their side of the story, they are directed to an ineffective and exasperating AI-based customer support.

Even advanced machine learning is now recognising that human oversight is required for bringing in nuance and ethical reasoning into automation, which is why HITL (Human in the Loop) systems are being developed. AI-based grievance redressal on Indian delivery platforms is far from the level of sophistication where it can function on its own and, hence, a human interface is essential.

Other countries have grappled with the challenges of gig work and responded with laws that attempt to balance the interests of technology platforms and workers. In 2021, China extended the right to local minimum wage to all platform workers. The European Union’s 2024 directives require platforms to ensure human oversight of automated decision-making. In Spain, a food delivery platform’s agreement with worker unions caps a working day at nine hours and guarantees a fixed annual wage and paid rest days. Ultra-fast delivery in other countries typically means 15-30 minutes. In some Latin American cities, such deliveries (like Rappi Turbo) are limited to select neighbourhoods in dense urban zones. India is the only country where a universal under 10-minute delivery is promised.

Despite Rajasthan and Karnataka enacting laws for gig workers’ welfare and Telangana and Jharkhand ready with draft bills, the situation on the ground for workers remains the same story of declining pay, long hours and punishing deadlines. Welfare measures are post-facto, but the process of how labour engages with platforms is still a gap that needs to be addressed. Chest-thumping about having created millions of jobs is meaningless if the quality of the jobs is sub par.

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