You Built a Trillion-Rupee Economy. They Gave You a Rating.

The Great 'Partnership' Lie

Somewhere in a gleaming Bengaluru office, a growth team came up with the word 'Partner.' Not driver. Not delivery worker. Not employee — god forbid. Partner. Like you and the app were two equals who shook hands over a shared vision document. One partner got a NASDAQ listing and a Series D. The other got a polyester jacket and a weekly incentive structure that changes without notice and without explanation. This is the founding mythology of India's gig economy: that calling exploitation a collaboration makes it one. It does not.

India has over 7.7 million gig workers today, a number NITI Aayog projects will cross 23 million by 2030. They power the logistics behind the country's fastest-growing consumer economy. They absorb traffic, weather, inflation, and customer rage so that the rest of us can track our biryani on a real-time map. In return, they receive: algorithmic management, surge-based earnings that evaporate when the surge does, no Provident Fund, no Employee State Insurance, no paid sick leave, and a rating system that functions simultaneously as a performance review, a disciplinary mechanism, and a termination threat. The partnership is very much one-directional.

What Five Stars Cannot Buy

Let us be precise about what gig workers in India currently lack, because vagueness is how injustice survives. There is no mandatory accident insurance covering the full working journey — only narrow policies that activate during the order window, if at all, buried in terms-of-service text nobody reads because the onboarding process doesn't pause for it. There is no minimum wage floor that platforms are legally bound to respect; per-delivery payout structures are engineered specifically to sidestep wage legislation. There is no right to grievance redressal that isn't a chatbot with a 48-hour response window. There is no collective bargaining — because Partners don't unionize, employees do, and the semantic sleight-of-hand exists precisely to block that door.

When a delivery worker gets into an accident on a rain-slicked road at midnight, the platform's liability ends at the edge of a terms-of-service clause that took three lawyers to write and three seconds to accept. The hospital does not accept five-star ratings as payment. The family does not receive bereavement support. The account simply goes inactive. Somewhere, an algorithm is already reassigning his orders.

They told me I was my own boss. My own boss cannot be deactivated for one bad-rating week. My own boss does not lie awake calculating whether the surge will cover petrol this month.

The Policy Graveyard: Laws Written, Protections Undelivered

The Code on Social Security, 2020, was supposed to change this. For the first time, Indian law formally acknowledged that gig and platform workers exist as a category. It created the conceptual architecture for a welfare fund, portability of benefits, and a registration mechanism. It was, on paper, a genuine legislative step. On paper is also where it has substantially remained. The implementing rules for gig worker provisions have not been fully notified at the central level. The welfare fund has not been constituted. Implementation has been delegated to states, and most states have delegated it to tomorrow.

Rajasthan passed the Platform Based Gig Workers (Registration and Welfare) Act in 2023 — the first state law of its kind in India — mandating a welfare board, a cess on platform transactions, and compulsory worker registration. It was a genuine first. It was also immediately challenged in court by platforms. Karnataka drafted similar legislation. It has been pending for over a year. The pattern is consistent: when workers gain ground in law, platforms gain ground in litigation, and workers return to delivering food while the case number accumulates digits.

What the TCJP Demands (Non-Negotiable, Unlike Everything Else in This Economy)

We are not asking for charity. We are asking for the baseline protections that Indian labour law spent seventy years constructing — extended to the workers the app economy deliberately classified out of reach. The platforms are not scrappy startups anymore. They are trillion-rupee enterprises with institutional investors, PR agencies, and lobby budgets that dwarf the welfare costs they are resisting. They can afford a cess. They have chosen not to. TCJP names that choice.

• Mandatory accident and health insurance for every registered gig worker, covering the full working window — not just the minutes an order is active.
• A central Gig Worker Welfare Fund, funded by a transparent platform transaction cess, with elected worker representation on the governing board.
• Portable benefits — PF-equivalent contributions tied to the worker, not the platform, so switching apps doesn't mean starting your safety net from zero.
• Statutory minimum earnings floors that cannot be legally structured around through per-delivery payment models.
• Right to appeal algorithmic deactivation before a human reviewer within a defined statutory timeline — not a chatbot, a human.
• Legal recognition of gig worker collectives for collective bargaining. 'Partner' is a word. Rights are a law.

The Stakes Are Not Abstract

This is not a fringe issue. India's gig economy is not a transitional phase on the way to formal employment — for millions, it is the formal economy. As automation compresses white-collar work and manufacturing fails to absorb the labour surplus, platform work is what fills the gap. If we permit that work to exist entirely outside the social security net, we are constructing an economy where the riskiest, most physically demanding, most weather-exposed work is performed by precisely the people with the least institutional protection. We have offloaded the cost of economic precarity onto those least able to carry it, wrapped it in brand colours, and called it disruption. TCJP calls it what it is: a policy choice, made by people who have never delivered anything in their lives except a pitch deck.