₹1,000 Crore and Counting: Gig Workers Strike Over Exploitation
On December 31, 2025, organized gig worker unions across India staged stoppages in major cities, including Bengaluru and Delhi, protesting exploitative conditions on platforms like Zomato, Ola, and Urban Company. The strike follows the government's 2025 Union Budget announcement to extend Ayushman Bharat – Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (AB-PMJAY) benefits to platform workers — a move many workers have criticized as too narrow in scope while deflecting from urgent structural issues like minimum wage guarantees and protection against arbitrary algorithmic penalties.
Breaking the Pattern: Profit Before Protection
The gig economy is not new, but the scale and structure of worker unrest in 2025 are noteworthy. Platform work, long described as flexible and empowering, is facing a backlash from its own workforce. The glaring irony is that despite contributing an estimated ₹1.25 lakh crore to India's GDP (Statista, 2024), gig workers are excluded from traditional labor frameworks like provident funds or mandatory occupational health and safety regulations. This strikes at the heart of India's labor economy where formalization has been elusive, and the informal sector — including gig workers — disproportionately bears risk without reward.
Initiatives like Rajasthan’s pathbreaking Gig and Platform Worker (Welfare and Regulation) Act, 2023, which mandates a monthly welfare cess from platforms, represent incremental progress. However, Karnataka and Telangana's proposed regulations for worker registration and welfare are stuck at draft stages, illustrating uneven political will across states. The strike signals that sporadic state-level interventions are insufficient when national frameworks falter in enforcement.
The Policy Machinery and its Fragmented Approach
The pivotal legislation recognizing gig workers — the Code on Social Security, 2020 — remains stuck in inconsistent application. While the Code legally entitles platform workers to accident insurance, health cover, and maternity benefits, glaring gaps persist. Sections meant to operationalize contributions from aggregators, state governments, and the Centre to build a promised Social Security Fund are yet to harmonize. The fund is reportedly still awaiting proportionate contributions from major stakeholders, leaving current benefits reliant on state-specific schemes like Rajasthan’s welfare cess model.
e-Shram Portal's registration of 3.37 lakh gig workers as part of its unorganized worker database is laudable for consolidating data. Yet it demonstrates less than 10 percent penetration, given estimates that India already has a 35 million-strong gig workforce (NITI Aayog, 2022). This mismatch between data coverage and policy readiness reveals significant institutional blind spots. Moreover, there is no provision under the Code forcing platforms to disclose algorithmic criteria like ride cancellations or incentive adjustments, often used to penalize workers arbitrarily.
The Numbers Behind the Narrative
The government’s recent ₹15,000 crore allocation for expanding AB-PMJAY coverage to gig workers was promoted as a milestone. However, this health coverage extends primarily to catastrophic or hospitalization expenses and does not cover outpatients — a critical gap given delivery drivers and riders face accident-prone low-security environments daily. Here lies the tension: health support reinforced by budgetary optics, but without addressing conditions creating health vulnerabilities in the first place.
Similarly, the Rajasthan approach showing early success — collecting over ₹120 crore in welfare contributions till December 2024 — is being watched closely. Yet these funds have not directly bolstered collective bargaining capacities at the local level. The lack of workers’ negotiating rights compounds fluctuating income woes; gig tasks facilitated by platforms rely on variable demand, skewing workers to volatile earnings cycles unprotected by minimum wage laws.
Uncomfortable Questions: Who Benefits from Flexibility?
Worker protests highlight deeper existential questions: Can platforms reconcile their business model — maximizing scalability and profits through algorithmic efficiency — with labor protections and livelihood security? Many aggregators defend their non-employee categorization of gig workers as facilitating “freedom to choose flexible hours,” yet algorithmic dependency leaves workers beholden to opaque metrics they cannot fully control.
The gender dimension also exposes fragility. While women’s participation in gig work has risen, studies reveal they disproportionately suffer from safety concerns, harassment, and underrepresentation in high-earning categories like long-distance transport tasks. Urban mobility platform jobs remain dominated by men, highlighting unequal access to opportunity despite optimistic claims about empowerment.
Timing compounds doubts about government sincerity: Are welfare populism-linked budgetary announcements aimed at assuaging unrest merely electoral face-saving mechanisms? With national elections due in mid-2026, worker grievances risk politicization while remaining unaddressed substantively.
Lessons from South Korea: Institutional Accountability
India’s regulatory struggle finds echoes elsewhere but also contrasts starkly with countries like South Korea. In 2018, South Korea enacted legislation mandating platforms to directly provide worker insurance covering physical risks and income loss. Moreover, labor dispute resolution bodies for gig workers operate independently of corporate liability — mechanisms notably absent in India.
Critically, South Korea also introduced algorithmic fairness norms requiring platforms to disclose wage calculation metrics publicly, thereby empowering workers to counter arbitrary deductions or ride cancellations. India’s regulatory ambition lacks similar commitments, keeping algorithmic control squarely in the hands of corporations.
Practice Questions for Examination
- Prelims MCQ 1: Under the Code on Social Security, 2020, which of the following benefits are explicitly extended to gig workers?
- A. Provident fund
- B. Health and maternity cover
- C. Paid annual leave
- D. Both A and C
- Prelims MCQ 2: The e-Shram portal, launched in 2021, aims to:
- A. Provide direct employment to gig workers
- B. Register unorganized workers, including gig and platform workers
- C. Subsidize gig economy startups
- D. Create local labor unions
Practice Questions for UPSC
Prelims Practice Questions
- Statement 1: Gig workers are entitled to benefits under the Code on Social Security, 2020.
- Statement 2: The Rajasthan Gig Worker Welfare Act, 2023 requires platforms to contribute to a welfare cess.
- Statement 3: The e-Shram Portal registered over 5 million gig workers as of December 2024.
Which of the above statements is/are correct?
- Statement 1: Gig work provides comprehensive safety nets and fair wages.
- Statement 2: Gig workers often lack legal protections from arbitrary penalties and economic instability.
- Statement 3: The gig economy is exclusively beneficial for all workers involved.
Which of the above statements is/are correct?
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the primary concerns raised by gig workers regarding current labor laws in India?
Gig workers have highlighted their exclusion from traditional labor frameworks, such as provident funds and health regulations, exposing them to significant risks. They face arbitrary penalties from algorithms used by companies and lack minimum wage guarantees, as well as collective bargaining rights, making their situation precarious.
How do recent government initiatives impact gig workers' welfare?
While the government has announced initiatives like extending Ayushman Bharat benefits and budgeting ₹15,000 crore for associated health coverage, these measures are criticized for being too limited. They primarily address catastrophic health events and do not offer comprehensive out-patient care or mitigate the unsafe working conditions faced daily by gig workers.
What role do state regulations play in the welfare of gig workers, and what challenges do they face?
State regulations, such as those introduced in Rajasthan, have shown potential by mandating welfare cess contributions, but such efforts are inconsistent across states. Many proposed regulations remain in draft stages, revealing challenges in political will and cooperation that hinder the establishment of a robust support system for gig workers.
In what ways does the gig economy represent a paradox in labor flexibility and worker security?
While gig work is often marketed as offering flexibility and independence, it simultaneously exposes workers to significant vulnerabilities due to algorithmic dependencies and the lack of safety nets. Many gig workers find themselves caught in fluctuating income patterns without protections typically afforded to traditional employees.
What impact does gender disparity have on women participating in the gig economy?
Women participating in the gig economy face heightened challenges, such as safety concerns and underrepresentation in higher-paying roles. Despite the rhetoric around empowerment, women's roles remain skewed towards lower-paying tasks, thus perpetuating gender inequities and limiting their economic advancement.
Source: LearnPro Editorial | Economy | Published: 31 December 2025 | Last updated: 3 March 2026
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