Between Freedom and Control: Inside India’s Gig Workforce

2 days ago
8 min read

When you hear 'gig economy', you likely picture food delivery partners, ride-hailing drivers, or Urban Company professionals. You aren't wrong, but you are only seeing the visible tip of a massive economic iceberg. Beyond the branded helmets and traffic jams lies a vast, unseen workforce. In this article, we look past the streets and behind the screens to uncover the full spectrum of India's gig landscape, revealing a quiet truth: how the promise of freedom and flexibility has morphed into a new form of digital control.

To understand what it actually means to be part of India's gig economy, a researcher in Nagpur, Kasim Saiyyad, enlisted himself as a ‘partner’ on a food delivery app for two months. His experiences with the platform, the lifestyle, the learnings, and his interactions with other delivery partners reveal truths about the gig economy that are hiding in plain sight.

He noted that gig workers surrender to a form of digital management by signing up for the platform apps. “Your phone isn't just a tool, it's a boss. GPS tracks your every move: speed, route choices, even idle minutes waiting for the next gig”.

Kasim notes how the earnings also tell a bigger tale. If an average delivery partner earns a gross income of Rs. 14,000 monthly, it usually includes an implicit cost for fuel (Rs. 5,100), bike maintenance (Rs. 800), mobile data (Rs. 600), phone EMI (Rs. 1,200), punctures (Rs. 50 average), and fines (Rs. 170). This costs them about Rs. 6,080 per month—or Rs. 200 daily—and hence their in-hand earnings come down to 50-60% of the gross. "People see the Rs. 50 delivery fee and think we're rolling in cash," another delivery partner said.

What Kasim experienced isn't unique to food delivery, it is the operating logic of an entire economy. To most of us, the gig economy typically looks like food delivery or ride-hailing services, a reality defined by branded helmets, waiting outside restaurants, and navigating traffic. However, beyond this, there is a quieter, invisible economy that thrives behind laptop screens.

Blue-collar roles, such as delivery partners and transport drivers, represent the highly visible street-level hustle. These typically require low-to-medium skill levels centred on physical reliability and spatial mobility. In contrast, white-collar gig work constitutes an invisible economy of high-skilled professionals, such as software developers, cybersecurity experts, and creative designers, who operate behind screens to provide specialised digital services. While these sectors differ in their public presence and the tools they use, they are both governed by the same structural redesign of labour, where traditional employment is replaced by platform-mediated tasks.

"The gig economy has transformed from a niche trend into a core driver of India's workforce evolution," said V Suresh, CEO, Foundit.

India's gig economy has exploded beyond a supplemental income into a core way for people to earn. NITI Aayog predicts the gig workforce will surge from 7.7 million in 2020-21 to 23.5 million by 2029-30, making up 4.1% of livelihoods and 2.5% of GDP by 2030. Yet the real impact of this boom unfolds not in the big metros like Mumbai or Bengaluru, but in smaller cities like Coimbatore, Bhopal, Vadodara and Hubballi.

In this article, we evaluate the gig economy as a comprehensive structural shift across India’s workforce. Moving past the assumption that gig work is confined to blue-collar labour, we look at how the widespread adoption of task-based work is transforming the work-life fabric of small and mid-sized Indian cities. Ultimately, we examine the profound social implications of a system built on the fragile balance between freedom and control.

What defines the Gig Economy

The gig economy is a vast spectrum of services and skills, held together by a single set of operating principles. At present, about 47% of gig work is in medium-skilled jobs, about 22% in high-skilled jobs, and about 31% in low-skilled jobs. Low-skilled jobs are entry-level, labour-intensive jobs that don’t require specialised skills. Medium-skilled jobs require some basic training and skill for the task; they also include hands-on labour for the tasks. High-skilled jobs require specialised formal training and project-specific skills.

This spectrum stretches from the highly visible to the virtually unseen. At one end of this are delivery partners, transport drivers, and warehouse runners who dominate the visible image of gig work in our cities. At the other end are freelancers working in technology, content, and digital services for clients across India and abroad, often from home.

This type of gig work is often not very visible in public, yet it is vastly growing in small cities. Cities like Coimbatore, Pune and Vadodara are seeing a higher-than-metro-level growth in white-collar gig work . In fact, the white-collar gig precedes the recent blue-collar gig boom and has been quietly powering diverse services for Indian companies for over a decade, including Fiverr, WorkIndia, Upwork etc. Over the last five years, the pandemic accelerated a shift in the gig economy. Enterprises are now moving beyond short-term projects, increasingly partnering with new-collar gig workers for core operational services. This trend has solidified the gig model as a permanent fixture.

Tech has eliminated the blinders (such as physical presence, set work hours and difficulty in finding relevant work) for both gig partners and enterprises, allowing them to embrace the gig culture. With the infusion of powerful tech infrastructure and the introduction of work-tech platforms, a formerly informal sector is today streamlining itself. However, the use of apps and platforms for gig work has complex layers that need to be decoded and understood in terms of their implications and management.

Platformising the Gig Work

Gig labour has been available in India for a while, but it has recently gained popularity as platform-based businesses in shared mobility, food tech, e-commerce, and skill-based services have gained public prominence.

India's workforce is about 80% informal, and technology enables the digitisation of a section of this informal labour through apps and platforms. Recruiters are also going the extra mile to attract workers from smaller cities through a tech-driven approach, providing multilingual support, job-tracking and monitoring solutions, and ease of payment. The platformisation of gig work is not just a technological shift; it works as a structural redesign of labour. Driven by corporate expansion beyond major metros, India's gig economy is seeing significant growth in Tier II and Tier III cities, with hiring demand in locations like Indore and Bhopal rivalling that of major urban centres.

The literature points to a duality in which platforms simultaneously expand economic access and deepen workers' precarity (Pandey & Khatoon, 2026). The primary argument that favours platforms centres on access to markets and modernisation, and on the seeming formalisation of gig work through three points:

First, the rapid absorption of informal workers into a digital space formalises the segregation of gigs and the use of digital payments.
Second, there are very low barriers to entry, which allow women and marginalised communities to participate in the workforce more than in traditional sectors.
Third, in Tier II and Tier III cities, gig jobs offer a crucial entry point into the economy for workers who cannot afford to wait for formal, traditional employment opportunities to arrive.

This has created local income opportunities, allowing workers to stay in their hometowns rather than migrating to metros for work.

However, the counter-argument for platformisation emphasises that though the mediums of work are formalised and follow a system, the protection and security of work are not ensured equally. At the forefront of this, by classifying workers as ‘independent contractors’, platforms strip workers of traditional labour protections, standard contracts, and job security. Secondly, platforms claim to offer flexibility and autonomy, but this is fundamentally challenged by opaque algorithmic control and micro-management through live tracking. Algorithmic control involves shifting authority from humans to algorithms to stimulate app workers' efforts and maximise their labour value throughout the entire work process (Duggan et al., 2023).

Ripples in the Social Fabric

The focus of India’s gig economy is shifting to Tier II and III, with hiring demand for gig work in cities like Indore has jumped by 59%, in Bhopal by 22.4%, and in Pune by 20%, in comparison to that of the metros. This shift into smaller cities like Shivamigga, Vadodara and Hubballi is driven by widespread smartphone access, affordable internet, and a youth-dominated labour pool seeking immediate income sources. Not just for workers, but there is also high demand for gig work from consumers, companies, and employers. However, beneath these growth figures lies a profound transformation of how work is perceived and lived.

In Jharkhand, the transition to gig work has created deep-rooted cultural friction. For many gig workers, the concept of a “naukri” or an actual job is historically tied to physical industries and workforces, such as a steel factory in Bihar, a jute mill in West Bengal, a welding workshop in Pune, or a construction site in Saudi Arabia, according to a report.

In other smaller cities, citizens also desire metro conveniences like a late-night pizza, quick grocery deliveries, and an easy private commute to work. Similarly, companies often tap into this established talent pool for specialised skills and flexible project-based work. Software developers, cybersecurity professionals, and IT consultants make up a significant part of the white-collar gig economy. Creative professionals such as graphic designers, writers, and digital marketers often offer their services on these platforms, too, because it allows them to pick work that excites them and businesses to access a large pool of fresh ideas and skills.

The platformisation of work has fundamentally shifted India's labour mobility. Instead of the traditional physical migration to major urban centres, we are witnessing a form of digital migration, in which workers tap into national or global platforms from their own hometowns.

However, within the city, the whole idea of community and local connections is also being transformed by the presence of service-provider platforms. The practice of asking a neighbour or friend for a recommendation is being replaced by the instant access offered by platforms that provide everything from home repair to legal consulting at the tap of a screen.

This shift toward digital convenience is actively reshaping the work-life fabric of our communities, replacing the organic, social-led demand for labour with a structured, platform-driven model that alters how these cities are built and how their citizens interact.

Conclusion

The gig economy has fundamentally transitioned from a side hustle to a core driver of workforce evolution over the last five years, especially in smaller cities. Beneath the visible movement of blue-collar workers and the surge of white-collar gig work lies a reality of algorithmic control, the illusion of freedom and flexibility, and a crisis of unemployment camouflaged within contractual commitments.

Ultimately, the future of work in India depends on moving beyond the mere digitisation of informal labour toward a comprehensive framework that guarantees worker dignity and stability. As the gig model becomes a permanent fixture in both high-skilled and low-skilled sectors, the central challenge for regulators and enterprises is to bridge the widening protection gap. Integrating digital growth with robust social safety nets is essential to ensure that this structural shift provides not just income but the long-term security necessary for a healthy and sustainable economy.

Gig work is not just delivery services, but also includes all tech, design, finance, and legal services offered as a ‘gig.’ So, the next time you are ordering from Blinkit, requesting a ride on Rapido, or hiring an independent consultant to fix a technical bug, remember that they are all nodes in the same economic system. It is essential to move beyond the role of a mere consumer to see them as individuals navigating a landscape where convenience for one person is built on the hyper-flexibility and algorithmic hustle of someone else.

How often do you use gig services in your daily life? How has your expereince been with it?

Are you someone who works freelance or on gigs for a client? How do you navigate the work-life balance?

Research Team: Praisy David, Rohit Bhatt, Yutika Vora and Tarun Sharma