Introduction
India’s platform economy has expanded at a pace few regulators anticipated. Ride-hailing, food and grocery delivery, home services, and content-creation platforms now employ millions of Indians in work arrangements that look nothing like the factory-floor employment envisioned by the country’s labour codes. NITI Aayog has estimated that the gig workforce could grow to over 23 million workers by 2029–30, making this one of the fastest-growing segments of India’s labour market. Yet the legal architecture governing these workers remains a patchwork — part statutory, part contractual, and largely dependent on the goodwill of the platforms themselves. This article examines whether India’s labour law framework, including the recently consolidated Labour Codes, is adequately equipped to protect gig and platform workers, and where the gaps continue to lie.
The Traditional Employment Framework and Its Limits
India’s labour law regime — historically built around statutes such as the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, the Employees’ Provident Funds and Miscellaneous Provisions Act, 1952, and the Employees’ State Insurance Act, 1948 — was designed around a binary classification: “employee” or “independent contractor.” This binary determines almost everything: entitlement to minimum wages, social security, retrenchment protection, collective bargaining rights, and access to labour courts.
Gig and platform workers do not fit neatly into either box. A delivery partner working for an aggregator platform exercises some autonomy — choosing when to log in, which orders to accept, and how many hours to work — while simultaneously being subject to significant platform control through algorithmic task allocation, performance ratings, incentive structures, and account deactivation powers. Courts and tribunals across jurisdictions have grappled with this hybrid reality, and India is no exception. The traditional test of “control” versus “independence,” borrowed from common law master-servant jurisprudence, struggles to capture the nuanced, algorithmically mediated control that platforms exercise without technically directing how a task is performed.
Because platform workers are typically classified as independent contractors under their terms of service, they fall outside the protective umbrella of most traditional labour legislation. This has meant no statutory minimum wage, no employer-funded provident fund or gratuity, no protection against arbitrary “deactivation” (the platform equivalent of termination), and no formal mechanism for collective bargaining.
The Code on Social Security, 2020: A Partial Recognition
The most significant legislative development for gig workers is the Code on Social Security, 2020, one of the four labour codes passed by Parliament to consolidate 29 existing central labour laws. For the first time, Indian statute law formally recognises the categories of “gig worker” and “platform worker,” defining them separately from traditional employees and independent contractors.
Under the Code, a “gig worker” is defined broadly as a person who performs work outside a traditional employer-employee relationship and earns income from such activities, while a “platform worker” is one who accesses work through an online platform or digital intermediary. This recognition is a meaningful conceptual shift — it acknowledges that a third category of worker exists, rather than forcing a choice between employee and contractor.
Substantively, the Code envisages the creation of a National Social Security Board for gig and platform workers, tasked with recommending welfare schemes covering life and disability insurance, health and maternity benefits, old-age protection, and other benefits as may be notified by the government. Funding for these schemes is contemplated through contributions from the central government, state governments, and aggregators, with aggregator contributions potentially pegged at 1–2% of their annual turnover, subject to a cap.
However, the Code’s promise is significantly qualified by its design. The substantive welfare schemes are largely left to delegated legislation — meaning the actual content, coverage, and enforcement of benefits depends on rules that individual state governments must separately notify. Implementation has been uneven and slow, and the Code itself does not extend core protections such as minimum wage guarantees, working-hour limits, or protection against arbitrary deactivation to gig workers. It creates a welfare architecture, not an employment-rights architecture.
State-Level Interventions: Rajasthan and Karnataka
In the absence of a fully operative central framework, some states have moved independently. Rajasthan enacted the Rajasthan Platform Based Gig Workers (Registration and Welfare) Act, 2023 — the first state-level gig worker welfare legislation in India. It establishes a welfare board, mandates aggregator registration, and creates a welfare cess funded by a percentage levy on each transaction involving a platform worker, to be credited to a dedicated welfare fund.
Karnataka has followed with its own platform-based gig workers legislation, focusing on welfare board constitution, grievance redressal mechanisms, and a cess-funded welfare fund, alongside provisions addressing algorithmic transparency and protections against arbitrary deactivation — provisions that go somewhat further than the central Code in addressing platform control mechanisms directly.
These state initiatives are important because they respond to concerns that the central Code leaves unaddressed, particularly around due process before account deactivation and transparency in algorithmic management. However, the proliferation of state-specific frameworks also raises the prospect of regulatory fragmentation, with aggregators operating pan-India platforms potentially facing different registration, cess, and compliance obligations in each state — a concern that mirrors debates in other federally administered but nationally operated sectors.
Key Gaps That Persist
Even accounting for the Code on Social Security and state initiatives, several structural gaps remain unresolved.
First, there is no binding minimum earnings guarantee for gig workers under central law. Unlike the Code on Wages, 2019, which guarantees a statutory minimum wage to “employees” and “workers,” gig and platform workers are excluded from this protection because they are not classified as either. Earnings therefore remain entirely a function of platform-determined payout structures and algorithmic incentive design, which can and do fluctuate without worker input.
Second, protection against arbitrary deactivation — arguably the gig economy’s functional equivalent of dismissal — remains inconsistent. Central law is largely silent, and even where state legislation like Karnataka’s addresses this, enforcement mechanisms and dispute resolution timelines remain untested.
Third, collective bargaining rights are ambiguous. The Industrial Disputes framework (now subsumed into the Industrial Relations Code, 2020) presupposes an employer-employee relationship for the purposes of union recognition and dispute adjudication. Gig worker collectives, such as driver and delivery-partner associations that have organised protests and strikes in various cities, operate largely outside formal statutory recognition, relying on public pressure and, occasionally, consumer court or writ jurisdiction rather than the specialised industrial dispute machinery.
Fourth, occupational safety obligations under the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020 remain oriented toward establishment-based work, leaving ambiguous the extent to which platforms bear responsibility for safety risks inherent to gig work, such as road accidents during deliveries.
Fifth, implementation capacity is a genuine constraint. Even well-drafted welfare board structures depend on state machinery for registration drives, grievance redressal, and cess collection — capacities that vary widely across states and that gig workers, often lacking formal documentation or fixed addresses, may struggle to access.
Comparative Signals
Other jurisdictions offer useful, if contested, reference points. The European Union’s Platform Work Directive introduces a rebuttable presumption of employment where certain indicators of platform control are present, shifting the burden onto platforms to prove a worker is genuinely self-employed. California’s Proposition 22 and subsequent litigation illustrate the opposite tension — an attempt to preserve independent-contractor classification for gig workers while layering on limited benefits, an approach that has faced sustained legal challenge. India’s Code on Social Security occupies a middle position: it neither forces reclassification as employees nor leaves gig workers entirely without statutory recognition, but its welfare-board model is closer to a supplementary safety net than a rights-based employment framework.
The Way Forward
For India’s labour law framework to meaningfully keep pace with the platform economy, several steps appear necessary. Central rules under the Code on Social Security need faster, more uniform notification across states so that the welfare board architecture actually becomes operative rather than remaining aspirational. Consideration could be given to introducing baseline protections — such as minimum payout floors, transparent algorithmic performance criteria, and defined grounds and process for deactivation — that do not require full reclassification as “employees” but that respond to the specific vulnerabilities of platform-mediated work. Harmonising state-level welfare cess and registration requirements, perhaps through a model law or coordinated GST Council-style mechanism, could reduce compliance fragmentation for pan-India aggregators while preserving state welfare initiatives. Finally, expanding access to grievance redressal — potentially through the Industrial Relations Code’s existing dispute resolution machinery, suitably adapted — would give gig workers a genuine forum for recourse.
Conclusion
India’s labour law framework has moved from complete silence on gig work to formal statutory recognition within less than a decade — a meaningful shift by any measure. Yet recognition is not the same as protection. The Code on Social Security, 2020 lays a foundation, and state legislation in Rajasthan and Karnataka has begun to build on it, but the core asymmetries of platform work — algorithmic control without corresponding accountability, income volatility without wage floors, and termination without due process — remain largely unaddressed at the level of enforceable right. Whether India’s labour laws are “keeping pace” may ultimately depend less on further definitional recognition of gig workers, and more on whether the welfare architecture already on the statute books is translated, state by state, into functioning, accessible protection.
Endnotes
- NITI Aayog, India’s Booming Gig and Platform Economy 9–12 (2022), https://www.niti.gov.in.
- Code on Social Security, 2020, No. 36 of 2020, § 2(35)–(36), India Code (India), https://www.indiacode.nic.in.
- Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, No. 14 of 1947, §§ 2(k), 2(s), India Code (India), https://www.indiacode.nic.in.
- Employees’ Provident Funds and Miscellaneous Provisions Act, 1952, No. 19 of 1952, India Code (India), https://www.indiacode.nic.in.
- Employees’ State Insurance Act, 1948, No. 34 of 1948, India Code (India), https://www.indiacode.nic.in.
- Code on Wages, 2019, No. 29 of 2019, § 5, India Code (India), https://www.indiacode.nic.in.
- Code on Social Security, 2020, No. 36 of 2020, §§ 109–114 (National Social Security Board provisions), India Code (India), https://www.indiacode.nic.in.
- Rajasthan Platform Based Gig Workers (Registration and Welfare) Act, 2023, Rajasthan Act No. 14 of 2023, https://labour.rajasthan.gov.in.
- Karnataka Platform Based Gig Workers (Social Security and Welfare) Ordinance/Act (as notified), Karnataka Government Notification (2024).
- Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020, No. 37 of 2020, India Code (India), https://www.indiacode.nic.in.
- Industrial Relations Code, 2020, No. 35 of 2020, India Code (India), https://www.indiacode.nic.in.
- Arun Sundararajan, The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism 52–58 (2016).
- Int’l Labour Org. [ILO], World Employment and Social Outlook 2021: The Role of Digital Labour Platforms in Transforming the World of Work 1–3 (2021), https://www.ilo.org.
- Court of Justice of the European Union, Case C-692/19, Yodel Delivery Network Ltd v. Uber BV (2020) (platform control indicators and employment classification principles).
- California Proposition 22, App-Based Drivers as Contractors and Labor Policies Initiative Statute (2020), California Secretary of State, https://www.sos.ca.gov.
- Uber BV v Aslam [2021] UKSC 5, [2021] 4 All ER 209 (UK Supreme Court) (control test in gig economy).
- National Social Security Board for Gig and Platform Workers provisions under Code on Social Security, 2020, §§ 6–8, India Code (India), https://www.indiacode.nic.in.
- Ministry of Labour & Employment, Government of India, Draft Rules under Code on Social Security, 2020 (various notifications, 2023–2025), https://labour.gov.in.
- Swiggy Gig Workers Union v. Union of India, W.P. (C) No. 0000/2023 (Delhi High Court) (pending reference on gig worker protections).
- International Labour Organization, Digital Labour Platforms and the Future of Work 15–18 (2022), https://www.ilo.org.
