What Does Gig Work on Digital Platforms Guarantee: An Urban Safety Net or Precarity?
Introduction
As an approach to addressing the challenge of high un(der)employment and low labour force participation rates in India, Ajay Shah and Maitreesh Ghatak make a case for encouraging gig work on digital platforms (henceforth “gig work”). They argue that ‘the gig economy is functionally the same as an urban employment guarantee scheme.… The rise of gig work thus improves the safety net in urban India. Interventions should be considered carefully to balance the legitimate need for better work conditions, but also to not kill the golden goose.’ Since Shah and Ghatak draw a parallel with the (Mahatma Gandhi) National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (henceforth “MGNREGS”), this essay examines the extent to which the parallel is meaningful, and the implications of interventions such as the four national labour codes, which became effective on 21 November 2025.
The following section provides an overview of the MGNREGS before describing the growth of the gig economy and the hopes vested in the employment opportunities it can provide. Section 3 will show how, despite similarities, MGNREGS and gig work have had different outcomes; while there is wide recognition of the social benefits resulting from the employment guarantees of the MGNREGS, gig work guarantees little, whether in terms of wages or collective bargaining rights. Section 4 argues why, by ignoring the structural dependence of labour on capital, the four labour codes, and other legislative initiatives in the states, pose no threat to the ‘golden goose’. The essay will conclude by emphasising the importance of acknowledging the precarity and vulnerability of gig workers as a first step in alleviating their condition.
The MGNREGA 2005, And Emergence Of Gig Work On Digital Platforms
A word about the MGNREGS and gig work on digital platforms before examining any parallels. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 entitles any adult willing to do unskilled manual work at the prescribed wage employment on local public works, with a guarantee of 100 days of unskilled manual work per household per year. MGNREGA is a demand-driven programme, and employment must be provided to eligible workers on demand, within 15 days.
Digital platforms have emerged as a new business model, in the form of “online marketplaces that involve at least three parties where the platform provider serves as an intermediary coordinating supply and demand sides of the other two parties”. Platforms lower transaction costs and mediate individual ‘gigs’ or tasks, such as last-mile delivery. The International Labour Organisation defines gig work as a ‘non-standard form of employment’, which includes all employment that is definite, and neither fulltime, nor part of a subordinate and bilateral employment relationship.
In India, gig work on digital platforms has rapidly grown across domains, including food delivery, home services, e-commerce and ride-hailing. NITI Aayog’s 2022 report on the gig and platform economy estimated that in 2020-2021, the number of gig workers was 7.7 million (2.6% of non-agricultural work-force), a figure expected to treble by 2029-2030 to 23.5 million (6.7% of non-agricultural work force).Recent projections by the VV Giri Institute indicate that the number of gig workers on platforms is likely to reach 61.6 million (14.89% of the non-agricultural workforce) by 2047.
It is against the backdrop of such projections that much hope is vested in gig work. The NITI Aayog report proclaimed that “the rapidly burgeoning gig workforce is ushering in a new economic revolution globally. India….is the new frontier of this revolution”. The revolutionary character is described in the following terms: “the livelihood generation and increased earning potential of platform jobs, along with the flexibility they offer, are what make them apt for the new-age digital economy… Any willing individual armed with an internet-enabled smartphone and a vehicle (motorised or even non-motorised), can monetise their assets, and earn a livelihood. Therefore, this democratising of access to jobs, with low entry barriers creates equal opportunities for all, which overtime can lead to improvement in the socioeconomic status of marginalised groups”. However, this framing obscures how ‘low entry barriers’ for platform access still exclude workers, especially those lacking the capital to acquire vehicles; precisely the marginalised groups the rhetoric claims to serve.
The official proclamations about the gig economy provide the basis for further claims about the potential of gig work on digital platforms to serve as an urban employment guarantee scheme. In the podcast Everything is Everything, Ajay Shah describes gig work as a “self-organising system that creates a safety net, without needing the effort of a government or a bureaucratically controlled system”. He even claims that “if you wish to make India a better place, round up every urban teenager, boys and girls, and take them into camps and teach them the basics of how to get gig work”. Similarly, TN Hari gushes that what “platforms have done is nothing short of a miracle both in terms of creating jobs as well as paying a fair wage”. The miracle is explained in terms of how the innovative application of technology to create efficient markets has enabled most platforms to extend “payouts beyond the minimum wage specified by the government’ to youth who have migrated from rural farmlands”.
Comparing The Outcomes Of The MGNREGS And Gig Work On Digital Platforms
In an evaluation by the World Bank, the MGNREGS has also been hailed for changing the very face of social protection in India. The program’s implementation architecture was an important innovation globally as well – with its focus on leveraging rights, technology tools, community-based accountability mechanisms and village Panchayats to respond to citizen demand for employment at scale. More than a decade into its existence, the verdict was that “despite the program’s ups and downs, its implementation continues to function at globally unparalleled levels”. More granularly, an ethnographic study in Andhra Pradesh shows how the implementation of the MGNREGS, using a combination of local social audits and technology by the state bureaucracy, brought about favourable developmental outcomes for marginalised citizens and expanded their rights and freedoms.
The praise for the expansion of work opportunities offered by gig work as well as MGNREGS is in part because both approaches are self-targeting (those who need work and have little alternative are able to find it on offer without any precondition), and self-adjusting (those who find other alternatives are free to pursue them anytime). However, the similarities end there.
Unlike in MGNREGS, where the state guarantees 100 days of work for anyone who demands it, with gig work, there is no guarantee provided by platforms. The availability of work is driven by customer demand and, as research by Fairwork India1 (see the reports of 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024) has shown, how work is allocated is determined by access conditions defined by platforms. These conditions include factors such as customer ratings, over which workers often have little control. Further, while the provisions of the MGNREGS are justiciable rights, and a worker is eligible for an unemployment allowance if work is not provided within 15 days, platforms are under no obligation to allocate work merely because a worker has logged on. Workers are therefore never sure how many “active” (paid) hours they will have during the period logged on. Uncertainty with how much work the platform’s algorithms will allocate leads to uncertainty about workers’ likely earnings.
Platforms, unlike the MNREGS, do not have a wage floor. Earnings fluctuate, depending on customer demand at different times of the day, and are linked to incentives (typically on completion of a minimum number of gigs). As a result, workers log in for much longer than statutory working hours to make anything close to a statutory minimum wage. Empirically, as research by Fairwork India shows, the claim that most workers earn an hourly minimum wage is not borne out by the evidence.2 Specifically, Fairwork India’s review of the largest platforms by workforce (11 in 2021, 12 each in 2022 and 2023, and 11 in 2024), showed that only three platforms in each of those years had a policy to ensure that all their workers earn at least the hourly local minimum wage after factoring in work-related costs. However, these policies were rarely put into practice, and there remain no legal means to enforce them. Thus, Uber’s slogan — ‘Drive when you want, make what you need’ — which proclaims flexibility in scheduling and the possibility of earning, is little more than marketing hype.
The inability of most gig workers on digital platforms to earn even a minimum wage highlights the limits of the efficient markets argument. Markets are not merely mechanisms for economic transactions; they are social institutions , structured by regulation. Indeed, firms cannot function smoothly without state regulation, especially when digital platforms, which are two-sided markets, generate network externalities that affect both competition and customer choice. There is little doubt that digital platforms reduce transaction costs. But, to the extent that gig workers cannot earn a minimum wage, it only highlights their precarity and vulnerability in increasingly flexible labour markets, and upends concerns about premature regulation. While the nature of regulation requires debate, the need for regulation is not in question.
Killing The ‘Golden Goose’ With Legislation And Regulation?
The passage of the labour codes has hardly presented any danger of ‘killing the golden goose’. The Code on Social Security, 2020 (CoSS) proclaims it is the first legislation to explicitly define a gig worker as “a person who performs work or participates in a work arrangement and earns from such activities outside of traditional employer-employee relationships” (Sec. 2(35)), and platform work as “a work arrangement outside of a traditional employer-employee relationship…”(Sec. 2(61)). Howeboth definitions merely define the gig worker and platform work in terms of what they are not; neither definition speaks to what gig work or platform work entails. The legislative history suggests that this reliance on negative definitions was not inadvertent. While the Standing Committee on Labour expressed concerns about the definition being broad and imprecise, the Labour Ministry justified this drafting choice as necessary to preserve flexibility for newly emerging forms of work. Despite acknowledging the position of the Ministry, the Committee expressed reservations about the lack of clarity on the status of gig workers.
The CoSS identifies a basket of social security benefits to gig workers based on a levy on the annual revenues of platforms. While the details of how the benefits will accrue to gig workers remain scanty, the functioning of the provisions depends on notification, funding, and scheme design by the government. Thus, the benefits to gig workers are not rights-based entitlements, unlike employees’ social security benefits, such as provident funds, where employers have a statutory obligation that is enforceable through judicial means when denied. The other three Codes make no reference to gig workers, meaning that these workers are not covered by any regulation on wages, working conditions, or collective bargaining. Workers retain the status of self-employed or independent contractors, with few rights.
The inability of workers to secure either minimum wages or bargaining rights not only exposes the limits of the efficient markets arguments, but also the inadequacy of contracts in governing the platform-worker relationship. Contract law assumes freely given consent between parties with equal bargaining strength, an assumption that does not hold in a labour market characterised by the structural dependence of labour on capital. Where such dependence is prevalent, and there is an inherent inequality in the bargaining strengths of labour and capital, contracts alone are insufficient, and must have the backing of labour laws that prescribe safeguards, such as minimum wages. Yet, labour laws have a fetish for employment status, and labour protection is typically limited to those in an employer-employee relationship.
This limitation is evident in the labour codes. While the CoSS extends social security by bracketing gig workers outside a traditional employee-employer relationship, it entrenches a legal boundary, excluding gig workers from core labour protection contained in the other labour codes. Thus, the limitation is embedded in the legal form itself.
The Karnataka Platform Based Gig Workers (Social Security And Welfare) Act, 2025 offers a partial departure from this model, by defining gig workers as persons performing work or engaged in a work arrangement, “based on terms and conditions laid down in such contract” (Section 2(e)). By recognising gig work as it exists, the legislation goes beyond offering social security, and addresses issues pertaining to occupational health and safety, algorithmic transparency, and dispute resolution mechanisms. However, the Karnataka Act too is silent on wages and collective bargaining. In the process, Fairwork’s demand that “substantive rights should be available to workers regardless of employment status” is not heeded. The continued focus on employment status is unlikely to yield significant protection for gig workers.
With neither the newly effective codes nor the Karnataka Act providing the necessary labour safeguards, traditional contract law principles alone cannot help gig workers overcome precarity and vulnerability. The economic reality of gig work is characterised by an asymmetry in bargaining power between technologically powerful, and financially deep-pocketed, platforms, and a fragmented gig workforce; and the dependence of that workforce on gig work due to the scarcity of other work opportunities. These realities overshadow the presuppositions of contracts regarding freedom and consent. As Kahn-Freund remarks about the employment relation: “In its inception it is an act of submission, in its operation it is a condition of subordination, however much concealed by that indispensable figment of the legal mind known as the contract of employment”. Although gig workers may formally disengage or “log off” at will, this insight is relevant whenever economic necessity continues to bind workers and structure consent. In this context, the notion of free consent rings hollow.3
Judicial routes offer only limited relief. While litigation (IFAT v. UOI, Uber BV v. Aslam) has played an important role in making gig work on digital platforms visible and engaging with questions of control or misclassification, it has generated only incremental gains or symbolic recognition. Courts cannot create a sui generis regulatory framework for gig work on digital platforms; they can only extend existing legal categories. This brings us back to the analysis of employment status. Although the judicial principle is that employment status is to be judged not by the contents of the contract, but by the conduct of employment, in practice, many courts frequently judge employment status based on the contract signed. The explicit mention of workers as independent contractors in platform contracts thus creates the first hurdle.
Going beyond the written contract, when the courts examine the nature of the work, their analysis typically centres on control and supervision. Yet, this inquiry often examines the control exerted by the platform at the point of setting prices, allocating tasks, or disciplinary actions against workers, while leaving unexamined the conditions under which the contract itself is entered. As Uber BV v. Aslam illustrates, even when the UK Supreme Court looked beyond formal contractual terms, subordination and control were treated as arising through the legal relationship, rather than as a pre-contractual economic condition that enables such control in the first place. Workers accept the platform contract not because they are misled, but because they have no other option. For gig work to resemble a golden goose, it is essential for the courts to consider how the status of workers reflects their socioeconomic position and structural inequality, rather than their contractual characteristics or manifestation of control. This will liberate the question of employment status from the realm of contractual interpretation and focus on those for whom labour law is relevant.
Acknowledging Precarity And Vulnerability In Gig Work On Digital Platforms
In this essay, we do not argue against the evidence that gig work on digital platforms provides work opportunities that are scarce, or even non-existent elsewhere. However, we do argue that gig work does not guarantee anything, other than perhaps precarity and vulnerability thanks to the conditions of work offered by platforms that “rely on extractive business model… leaving gig workers with little scope for upward mobility”. Legal remedies thus far, especially the CoSS, do little to mitigate the broader social asymmetries between workers and platforms that lead to such conditions. Gig work is hardly the functional equivalent of the demand-driven, rights-based MGNREGS. It is not even the equivalent of the newly adopted VB G RAM G Bill, which at least guarantees 125 days of work despite departing from the letter and spirit of the MGNREGS.4
More broadly, our argument is that the growth of gig work does not mean that it can be conceptualised as an urban NREGS. Rather, it is a sign that the state has abdicated its responsibility of providing labour safeguards for workers to participate in the platform economy without their vulnerability taking another form. When the state has managed to create and run a centrally legislated and funded MNREGA, with decentralised implementation, its claim that a barely regulated and questionable business model will be superior to government or bureaucratic action is muddy at best. We end by emphasising that supporting the expansion of gig work on digital platforms can no longer be business as usual; instead, it requires “collective action guided by political wills that make work what is structurally barely possible”, i.e., dismantling the barriers that have thus far given workers little voice in actively determining the conditions of their social reproduction.
[1] Balaji Parthasarathy was the Principal Investigator of the Fairwork India project and Janaki Srinivasan was the co-Investigator. Besides Tony Mathew, other Research Associates on the project over time included M. Bilahari, Meghashree Balaran, Damni Kain, Raktima Kalia, Amruta Mahuli, Mounika Neerukonda, Kanikka Sersia, Aditya Singh and Pradyumna Taduri.
[2] Balaji Parthasarathy et al, ‘The Promise of Flexibility, the Experience of Precarity: Gig Work on Digital Platforms in India’ in Ravi Srivastava and Biswajit Dhar (eds), India Social Development Report 2024/25 (Oxford University Press).(forthcoming).
[3] Otto Kahn-Freund and others, Kahn-Freund’s Labour and the Law (3rd edn, Stevens 1983) 18. 8 Velerio De Stefano and others, ‘Platform Work and the Employment Relationship’ (2021) ILO Working Paper 27 8.
[4] The VB-G RAM G approach to work allocation is topdown, and “command-driven” i.e., it adopts a supply-driven as opposed to the bottom-up, demand-driven approach of the MGNREGS. The top-down approach is reinforced by the decision to use centrally determined “objective parameters” and to lower the cap of the central government contribution from about 90% to 60%.
Rajendran Narayanan, ‘Death Knell for the Rural Job Guarantee’ The Hindu (22 December 2025)<https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/death-knell-for-the-rural-job-guarantee/article70425853.ece> accessed 29 December 2025.