The Gig Economy and Informal Child Labour: Has the Law Failed to Evolve?

THE GIG ECONOMY AND INFORMAL CHILD LABOUR: HAS THE LAW FAILED TO EVOLVE?

1. INTRODUCTION

In November 2023, a BBC investigation reported the death of Leo, a teenager who had first started delivering food at fifteen and was killed at seventeen, riding a borrowed motorbike, still working under a Deliveroo account registered in an adult’s name. He was two full years below the platform’s own minimum age. His stepfather’s words, “No one is accountable, not at all for anything,” say far more than just pointing out a corporate failure. They expose a legal one.[1]

Child labour law was built for a world where work was visible. Factories had gates. Mines had entrances. Employment had identifiable employers. The ILO defines child labour as work that takes away children’s childhood, dignity, and proper development.[2] The gig economy has made that framework harder and harder to apply. Work now flows through apps, family accounts, and digital platforms, making exploitation more fluid, less stable, and far harder for anyone to detect.[3] Where the law once asked “who employed this child?”, the gig economy now answers: no one. The child is not an employee. The platform is not an employer. The work is not a job. In that gap, economically vulnerable children remain structurally unprotected.

This essay argues that India’s child labour law has not recognised the gig economy as a new site of exploitation. The employment relationship, which still acts as the foundational trigger for child protection, is no longer a sufficient legal category for the kind of work that exists today. What is needed is a shift: from relationship-based protection to platform-based accountability.

1. THE LAW ON PAPER: EXISTING FRAMEWORKS AND THEIR LIMITS

India’s constitutional framework speaks clearly in favour of children. The Constitution is clear on where it stands. Article 24 bars children under fourteen from working in factories, mines, and anything classified as hazardous. Articles 39(e) and 39(f) push the expectation even further, making it the State’s actual duty to protect children from abuse and exploitation, not merely something it ought to consider. Article 21A rounds it off with a guarantee of free and compulsory education for every child between six and fourteen.[4] The promise written into the Constitution is not ambiguous: a child’s years are meant to be spent growing up, not working. But promises are not the same as protection.

The Child and Adolescent Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986, updated in 2016, takes a firm stance: no child should be employed in any occupation, and adolescents between fourteen and eighteen are kept away from anything hazardous.[5] The Supreme Court has not left these provisions to gather dust. In Bachpan Bachao Andolan v. Union of India,[6] the Court stepped in and ordered the setting up of Child Labour Rehabilitation-cum-Welfare Funds, backing its words with concrete enforcement directions. M.C. Mehta v. State of Tamil Nadu[7] pushed things further, with the Court making clear that the State’s job does not end at prosecuting employers; it has an actual duty to rehabilitate the children too. And in People’s Union for Democratic Rights v. Union of India,[8] the Court refused to read “employment” too narrowly, stretching constitutional protection to cover workers in informal and non-contractual arrangements as well.

The Code on Social Security, 2020 was the first time Indian law actually put a name to what gig workers and platform workers are, recognising them as distinct legal categories for the first time.[9] The scale of what that means becomes clearer when you look at the numbers. NITI Aayog puts the gig workforce at 7.7 million in 2020 and expects it to reach 23.5 million by 2029-30.[10]And yet, for all that the Code does, it never once sets a minimum age for platform work. It contains no age-verification obligation. It imposes no platform liability when a minor is found performing gig work through its infrastructure. The law has named the problem. It has not solved it.

III. THE STRUCTURAL GAP: WHY EXISTING LAW CANNOT REACH PLATFORM CHILD LABOUR

The failure here is not incidental but structural. Every child labour protection in the Indian legal framework is triggered by an employment relationship. The Child and Adolescent Labour Act prohibits “employing” a child. Article 24 applies to employment in factories and mines. Labour inspectorates presuppose a workplace to inspect and an employer to prosecute. The gig economy removes all three of these conditions, systematically.

The label matters more than it might seem. By calling their workers independent contractors rather than employees, platforms have managed to keep a comfortable distance from legal responsibility. Courts in country after country have gone along with this, seeing these companies not as employers running a workforce but as technology platforms simply sitting in the middle.[11] For child protection, this creates a serious problem. No employer means no legal duty to verify age. No employment relationship means no employment-based prohibition can even apply. No workplace means no inspection is possible. Somewhere along the way, the law got left behind. It is still busy tracking down employers and locating workplaces, tools that were built for a time when work happened inside buildings you could point to on a map. The platform economy moved on without waiting. The real questions now have nothing to do with any of that: it is about who holds power over the task, who walks away richer for the labour, and what the legal system does when the worker turns out to be a child using a parent’s account or a phone passed around the house.

Platforms check identity at sign-up, but accounts get passed around after that. A fifteen-year-old delivering under someone else’s login does not exist in the eyes of the law: no contract, no rights, no recourse. The United States shows how serious this has become: child labour violations climbed 88% between 2019 and 2023, with over USD 8 million in penalties issued that year alone.[12] It changed nothing. If a country with functioning labour institutions is losing this battle, India, where inspectorates are stretched thin and platforms are pushing deeper into smaller cities, is in a far worse position.

1. SOCIO-ECONOMIC VULNERABILITY: THE DEMAND SIDE OF CHILD GIG LABOUR

A purely doctrinal account misses something important. The ILO notes that child labour remains closely tied to family contexts and structural poverty.[13] India’s informal economy accounts for more than 80% of total employment.[14] For households near the poverty line, a working teenager’s income is not supplementary but survival income. Gig platforms offer a set of features that make them especially attractive to child workers: no formal application process, no documentation requirements, immediate cash payment, and flexible hours that fit around intermittent school attendance. The problem begins when family “help” becomes routine contribution, when that contribution solidifies into economic dependence, and when dependence gradually starts displacing schooling and rest.

There is a pattern to where these platforms choose to go. The markets they move into fastest tend to be the ones where people have the least and regulators have the fewest resources to push back. Swiggy, Zomato, and the rest have expanded quickly across smaller Indian cities, but none of that growth has come with better ways of checking who is actually doing the work or any meaningful increase in enforcement. The footprint keeps growing. The safeguards have not kept pace. A child who is not formally counted becomes legally silent. And once rendered invisible, exploitation normalises with ease. Penalising child workers or their families is simply not an adequate enforcement strategy. A child delivering food to feed younger siblings is not a criminal. They are a victim of a system that has consistently refused to hold the one party truly responsible: the platform.

1. THE WAY FORWARD: TOWARD PLATFORM-BASED ACCOUNTABILITY

A meaningful legal response must shift attention from the form of work to its actual effect on children. Four reforms are essential.

First, the Code on Social Security, 2020 must be amended to expressly prescribe a minimum age for gig and platform work, matching the threshold already established under the Child and Adolescent Labour Act. Second, platforms must be made subject to a non-delegable duty of age verification, an obligation that cannot be passed off through contractual terms to individual account-holders, and that covers every person who performs work through their infrastructure, whether as an original registrant or as a substitute. Third, algorithmic accountability must be legislated: platforms should be required to maintain auditable records of all workers and provide mandatory disclosure to labour authorities on request, transforming them from passive conduits into accountable participants in labour governance.

Fourth, India should engage proactively with the ILO’s ongoing standard-setting process on platform work, expected to be deliberated at International Labour Conferences in 2025 and 2026.[15] The ILO rightly points out that child labour is rarely an isolated moral failure but rather a symptom of deeper structural pressure, requiring poverty reduction, decent adult employment, expanded education access, and social security alongside legislation.[16] These reforms must also be supported by dedicated digital labour inspectorates with the technical capacity to audit platform records, financial penalties calibrated to platform revenues rather than fixed amounts, and civil liability mechanisms that allow child workers and their families to bring direct claims against platforms.

1. CONCLUSION

The question this competition poses deserves an honest answer. The law has evolved in principle, but not sufficiently in method. Its values remain strong. Its categories are the problem.

Technology evolves exponentially. Legal systems evolve step by step. That gap is not just a failure of enforcement. It is a deeper failure of recognition, in that the law continues to protect what it can clearly see, while the economy shifts exploitation into spaces that are less visible, less documentable, and therefore far easier to ignore.

India has Article 24. It has the Child and Adolescent Labour Act. It has Supreme Court judgments of remarkable ambition. What Leo’s death reveals, and what thousands of unnamed children working on Indian gig platforms experience every day, is what follows when a law’s foundational architecture has not kept pace with a fundamentally changed economy. The employment relationship was never a morally necessary condition for child protection. It was only a practical one, chosen because employment was historically the main site where exploitation occurred. That is no longer true.

A law that cannot see changing exploitation cannot fully prevent it. What is now required is the political and legislative will to place the duty of child protection where it actually belongs, namely not with the child, not with the account-holder, but with the platform that profits from their labour.

[1] Angus Crawford, ‘Children Working as Riders for Food Delivery App: BBC Investigation’, BBC News (14 November 2023).

[2] ILO, ‘What is Child Labour’ <https://www.ilo.org/topics/child-labour> accessed June 2026.

[3] ILO, ‘When Work Becomes Invisible: Child Labour, the Gig Economy, and the Law’s Blind Spots’ (ILO, 2024).

[4] Constitution of India, arts 24, 39(e), 39(f) and 21A.

[5] Child and Adolescent Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act 1986 (as amended 2016), ss 3, 3A.

[6] Bachpan Bachao Andolan v Union of India (2011) 5 SCC 1.

[7] M.C. Mehta v State of Tamil Nadu (1996) 6 SCC 756.

[8] People’s Union for Democratic Rights v Union of India (1982) 3 SCC 235.

[9] Code on Social Security 2020, s 2(35) (defining ‘gig worker’); s 2(61) (defining ‘platform worker’).

[10] NITI Aayog, ‘India’s Booming Gig and Platform Economy’ (NITI Aayog, 2022) 3.

 

[11] Castellanos v California, California Supreme Court (25 July 2024) (upholding Proposition 22).

[12] US Department of Labor, Child Labor Enforcement Outcomes: Fiscal Years 2023-2024 (DOL, 2024).

[13] ILO, ‘Child Labour: Global Estimates 2020, Trends and the Road Forward’ (ILO-UNICEF, 2021) 11.

[14] ILO, Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Picture (ILO, 3rd edn, 2018) 13.

[15] Indian Journal of Integrated Research in Law, ‘Gig Workers and the Labour Laws’ (2024) IV(VI) IJIRL 712.

[16] ILO, ‘Child Labour: Global Estimates 2020’ (n 13) 15.