India Can’t Fix the Gig Economy with Social Security Alone

India appears to be moving toward a more formal social protection architecture for gig workers. On paper, this matters. For years, platform companies have treated delivery riders, drivers, and other app-based workers as “partners” rather than workers, shifting the costs of fuel, maintenance, health risk, and social insecurity onto individuals while retaining deep control over how work is assigned, monitored, and rewarded. Any move that compels contributions toward health insurance, life cover, maternity benefits, or welfare support is therefore significant.

But the real question is not whether social security is a step forward. It is.

The real question is whether precarious platform work can be formalized without challenging the underlying architecture of platform power.

My answer is: not really.

India may be trying to solve the gig worker crisis at the level of welfare while leaving intact the labour regime that produces insecurity in the first place. That means treating the symptom while only partially touching the disease.

Why the moment matters

This policy shift matters because platform work is no longer marginal. It has become a major part of India’s urban labour market, especially for young men entering work through delivery, driving, logistics, and related services. In city after city, platform labour has become normalised as a default livelihood option rather than an exceptional stopgap. The state can no longer pretend this is a small experimental corner of the economy.

That is why any mandatory contribution framework for gig worker welfare looks like progress. It signals that gig workers cannot simply be left outside all institutional protection. It also suggests that the fiction of pure flexibility is weakening. Once the state begins to require platform firms to support workers’ welfare, it implicitly acknowledges that these firms are not neutral intermediaries linking independent entrepreneurs to customers. They are labour-governing institutions.

But that recognition remains incomplete.

The problem is not just lack of benefits

In public debate, gig workers are often presented as a vulnerable group lacking accident insurance, health support, or maternity coverage. That is true, but it is only one part of the story.

The deeper problem is that platform workers are governed by opaque systems that determine their earnings, order flow, work intensity, and continued access to employment-like opportunities. Social security can soften some consequences of this regime. It does not alter the regime itself.

My research with Zomato delivery workers in Delhi showed this clearly. Workers did not only suffer because they lacked welfare. They suffered because the labour process itself was structured around opacity, unilateral rule changes, and the transfer of cost and risk onto workers.

Workers described long working days, unstable net earnings after expenses, penalties linked to metrics they did not fully understand, and app-based discipline with little meaningful recourse. Many experienced the app not as a neutral technical tool but as a manager: one that assigned, tracked, ranked, penalised, and silently reconfigured the terms of work.

That is why social security alone cannot resolve the core contradiction of platform labour. A worker may receive insurance and still remain trapped in a labour regime where:

• earnings are unpredictable,
• waiting time is unpaid,
• account deactivation functions as dismissal,
• algorithmic decisions remain unaccountable,
• and the platform holds all meaningful information.

Formalizing welfare without formalizing rights

This is where the current policy turn becomes politically interesting.

India seems to be moving toward a model in which gig workers may gain partial welfare recognition without being granted full labour rights. That is a very specific kind of institutional compromise. It says, in effect: you are vulnerable enough to deserve limited protection, but not worker enough to deserve clear employment rights, bargaining power, or transparency in management.

This compromise may be politically convenient. It allows the state to appear responsive without confronting the central issue of misclassification. It also allows platform firms to absorb welfare obligations as a cost of doing business while preserving control over the labour process.

In other words, social security can be made compatible with continued precarity.

That is why the details matter so much. If access to benefits depends on thresholds like 90 days of engagement or other narrowly defined criteria, large numbers of workers may fall through the cracks, especially in a sector marked by churn, intermittent work, and unstable platform attachment. The workers most exposed to insecurity may be the easiest to exclude.

The issue of algorithmic power

Any serious reform of the gig economy has to confront algorithmic management.

This is not a secondary technical issue. It is the core mechanism through which platform firms govern workers while avoiding the appearance of direct employer authority. Algorithms decide who gets work, under what conditions, at what pace, and under what penalties. They also make power harder to contest, because workers often cannot see how decisions are made.

In my thesis, I argue that platform control in food delivery operates not only through surveillance but through what I call algorithmic opacity: workers are dependent on systems whose decision rules remain hidden from them. This opacity is not accidental. It is functional. It keeps workers uncertain, weakens their ability to plan, and strengthens managerial discretion without visible human managers.

That is why demands for social security must be paired with demands for:

• algorithmic transparency,
• pay transparency,
• predictable compensation rules,
• fair appeals against penalties and deactivations,
• and recognition of workers’ collective voice.

Without this, the state may end up building a welfare shell around an authoritarian labour architecture.

Can you formalize precarity?

This is the central question.

India may be attempting something Europe debates and the United States often avoids: mandatory platform contributions to worker welfare. That is not trivial. But formalizing social support is not the same as transforming the power relations of platform work.

A precarious job does not stop being precarious because it now includes a thin layer of welfare. It stops being precarious when workers gain greater control over wages, information, working time, discipline, and representation.

If the current framework leaves untouched the platform’s power to:

• unilaterally alter incentives,
• obscure pay logic,
• punish through ratings and deactivations,
• and deny workers meaningful bargaining channels,

then what is being formalized is not dignity, but managed precarity.

What a serious reform agenda would require

If India wants to lead on gig worker regulation, it should not stop at social security. A serious agenda would include at least four things.

First, algorithmic transparency. Workers should know how pay is calculated, how ratings affect work allocation, and how penalties or deactivations are triggered.

Second, compensation reform. Waiting time, return trips, and platform-induced delays should not remain invisible and unpaid.

Third, due process. Deactivation should not function as silent digital dismissal without explanation or appeal.

Fourth, collective representation. Welfare boards and schemes cannot substitute for worker voice. Platform workers need institutional mechanisms for consultation, dispute resolution, and bargaining.

Without these, the system will remain tilted toward platform power even if welfare improves at the margins.

The bigger lesson

The gig economy has always been sold as innovation. But for workers, it has often meant an old story in a new form: risk shifted downward, control concentrated upward, and insecurity packaged as freedom.

India’s new framework could be an important beginning. But only if it is treated as the first layer of regulation, not the final answer.

The point is not to reject social security. It is to refuse the illusion that social security alone can fix what is broken.

Because the crisis of gig work is not only that workers lack benefits.

It is that they labour inside systems they do not control, under rules they cannot see, for firms that deny being employers while exercising employer-like power.

Until that contradiction is confronted, the platform economy will remain what it already is: a formalizing economy built on informalized labour.

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Bio

Abhinav Kumar is a researcher working on labour, technology, and platform economies. He completed his PhD in Economics at the Centre for Informal Sector and Labour Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (2025).